covered tables with a dishclout which (except that it lacked the conventional skull and cross-bones) might have flown from the masthead of a pirate ship,”[1]—John, sung by the early-lamented Lloyd McKim Garrison in one of his most charming “Ballads of Harvard”:
But as long as the coffee’s first-class
Want of linen shan’t make us rebel;
And John, in his shirtsleeves, may pass
If he'll poach us our eggs just as well.
We will pardon the dirt and the smell
If the toast be well-buttered and thin,
For nobody cares to be “swell”
When he goes to the Holly Tree Inn.
There was “Herbie” Foster at the corner of Holyoke Street, with bristling white moustache, eye-glasses on a bit of pink string, and superannuated straw hat (which was so much a part of him, winter and summer, that he was generally supposed to sleep in it), imperturbably shaking up (soft) drinks at his soda-fountain, or explaining that his ham sandwiches, of which he sold an incredible number of dozens every day, were so good because they were all made by his old mother.
There was O. G. Fosdick, affectionately known to thousands only by his title of “Cap,” the conductor of the “night car” that hourly jingled out from Bowdoin Square, Boston, filled with belated devotees of pleasure.
- ↑ From a delightful article—unfortunately anonymous—on “Harvard Old-Timers,” several times quoted above. Harv. Grad. Mag., xvii, 616.
