How considerate with the drunks was Cap; how obliging if the last nickel had gone for a “musty” at Billy Park’s; how tolerant of “close harmony” and “rough house” among his fares; and how unfailingly, after calling the streets all the way out, would he once again slide back the door when the car reached the Yard entrance now marked by the McKean Gate, and arouse the soundest sleepers with his cheerfully stentorian “Good morning, gents! Sports’ Alley!”
There was—but let each old grad pick his favorite from that gallery of pleasant eccentricity.[1]
Now all are gone. And the ancient alumnus wanders disconsolately through the tawdry commercialism of the Square and the trim conventionality of the Yard—now minus even that inanimate character, the Pump—and murmurs to himself (being a little rusty on his French), “Other times, other manners.” The new Harvard seems but a poor drab place, bereft of the sparkle of its former whimsical contrasts and mild Bohemianism, and with so little individuality that you cannot tell a dun from a dean. What the University needs, he ruminates, is a fresh lot of “characters.” Cannot a fund be started—they are always starting funds now-a-days
- ↑ Several of the foregoing characters (and others) are described and pictured in an article by N. C Metcalf, ’96, “Some Ghosts that Will Haunt Harvard’s Old Grads,” in the Boston Evening Transcript for June 14, 1922.
