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A Dartmouth 
 
 Book of Remembrance 
 
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A Dartmouth 
 Book of Remembrance 
 
 Pen and Camera Sketches of Hanover and 
 
 the College Before the Centennial 
 
 and After 
 
 By y 
 Professor Edwin J. Bartlett, 1872 
 
 The Webster Press 
 
 Hanover, New Hampshire 
 
 1922 
 
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 Copyright — 1922 
 by The Webster Press 
 
 THE F. J. HEER PRINTING CO. 
 Columbus, Ohio 
 
 NOV 3iS22 
 
 ©C1A690867 
 
PREFACE 
 
 IN JANUARY, 1904, two illustrated lectures 
 were given by five of Hanover's long time 
 citizens upon ''Hanover Forty Years Ago." 
 The room was crowded and the interest great. 
 The lectures were afterwards printed in pamphlet 
 form from shorthand notes and are a mine or 
 perhaps better a potato patch of homely items 
 from which every citizen might dig nourishment. 
 But the pamphlet is out of print; college matters 
 were not the primary object of the lectures; dif- 
 ferent people remember different things; some 
 gleanings remain. And if excuse is needed for 
 trying to take advantage of these facts, the sad 
 knowledge of the passing of many of multiple 
 memories and picturesque vocabularies without 
 leaving any record is an incentive to lesser ones 
 to do what they can or to try to do what they 
 can't. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I The College 9 
 
 II The Village 24 
 
 III The Dartmouth Hotei 43 
 
 IV The Old Chapel 64 
 
 V The Burying Ground 82 
 
 VI College Discipline 99 
 
 VII Res Angustae llo 
 
 VIII Teaching School 139 
 
I 
 
 THE COLLEGE 
 
 Mr. Charles P. Chase at the beginning of his 
 dissertation upon the Migratory Houses of Han- 
 over gives the experiences of a freshman enter- 
 ing college in 1865. In 1868 the experiences 
 were much the same; but this freshman came 
 from Chicago by way of Montreal, and was 
 aroused by the knuckles of a Pullman porter to 
 crawl out upon the platform of the worst railroad 
 junction at 3 A. M., about the same as now. The 
 chill night air of September 3rd struck into his 
 unresisting form, but his principal reaction was 
 the awe of the dweller in a flat country at the 
 surrounding mountains. After five well-known 
 hours of discomfort, an 8 o'clock train, as now, 
 bore him to Hanover. The train facilities — if 
 that is a proper term for them — differed little 
 from those of the present time. A train 
 sauntered southward about 11 A. M., and a mail 
 train wandered in at any time after 2 P. M. It 
 is also within memory that a train arrived from 
 the south an hour or so after midnight. Unless 
 he can prove an alibi on that particular morning, 
 I shall assert that Ira B. Allen himself met me 
 with a Concord coach and drove me up that most 
 discouraging hill and set me down hungry and 
 homesick near the old Dartmouth Hotel. Later 
 I may make remarks upon this institution, as I 
 
 (9) 
 
10 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 think my wife and I are now a majority of the 
 survivors of two years of its hospitality for room 
 and board. 
 
 Ira Allen and his wife I knew better later when 
 he had a baked apple face and was rather poddy. 
 Mrs. Allen's voice I often heard regulating affairs 
 
 The Dreary Entrance 
 
 at the stable, but she was a good woman and many 
 are the times, in the days of much use of the 
 extraordinarily cheap stable, when, as I paid my 
 little livery bill, she would slip me back 50c or 
 so with the statement that the remainder of the 
 cash was plenty. Ira was inclined to somnolence 
 in his later days, but was capable of peppery lan- 
 guage on occasion. One of the utterances upon 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 11 
 
 which rested his reputation as a local humorist 
 was when good Dr. Leeds sought to bring him 
 into the fold and make of him a regular attendant 
 at the meeting-house; *'Well, Doctor," he said, ''if 
 I'm not there don't you wait, but go right ahead 
 with the services," And speaking of Dr. Leeds 
 
 The Joyful Outlet 
 
 and the former blank white rear wall of the 
 church, Mrs. Susan Brown, who was not one to 
 speak lightly of the minister, said that when he 
 was in the pulpit he looked like a fly in a pan of 
 milk. 
 
 After refreshment, a cousin who had one year's 
 advantage of me took me in charge and I did those 
 things which were becoming to a freshman, visit- 
 
12 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 ing those kindly Profs, in their studies, and pass- 
 ing all my examinations, some of them by an- 
 swering inquiries concerning my father's health 
 and if I hadn't come a good way to go to college. 
 However, I was prepared to enter, so what dif- 
 ference did it make ? 
 
 This was fifty-four years ago. Compare the 
 College now and then by means of cold facts, the 
 reader furnishing the other side of the parallel 
 column. The total enrollment of the College that 
 fall was 370. Fifty-three were from without New 
 England, and of the remainder more than half 
 were from New Hampshire. The list of all the 
 faculty including non-resident medical lecturers 
 was 28, of whom one, the Dean Emeritus, now 
 survives. The "Academic" faculty numbered 14, 
 with the addition of one non-resident lecturer. 
 There were 261 "Academies." The catalog of the 
 time gives Departments — Medical, Academic, 
 Chandler Scientific, Agricultural. These were all 
 distinct and separate in instruction and admin- 
 istration. The Agricultural Department was the 
 New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the 
 Mechanic Arts with a separate Board of Trustees. 
 It had just started up with a Junior class of 10 
 but no faculty of its own. The Thayer School 
 had been founded but not yet put in operation. 
 
 The buildings were the old row, Wentworth, 
 Dartmouth, Thornton and Reed, the Observatory 
 and the Chandler Building, with the gymnasium 
 (now the home of the Thayer School) which had 
 been in use something over a year. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 18 
 
 Under the name of South Hall the College of- 
 fered the Old Hotel (where is now the Currier 
 Block) to ''indigent" Freshmen, at $7.50 a year 
 for each one of two in a room. Although the ac- 
 
 South Hall, the Home of Eleven '72 Freshmen 
 
 commodations were as indigent as their oc- 
 cupants, life in the old barrack had many joys. 
 
 There were no ''snap" electives because there 
 were no electives of any kind. Every one in the 
 Academic Department studied the same things 
 if he studied at all. And if sitting beside the 
 same men for four years and unitedly learning 
 how each professor manipulated his cards and 
 
14 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 applied the marking scale had its disadvantages, 
 it also had advantages which will never come 
 again. That scale was a wonder: 1 was perfect; 
 5 was absolute zero; and as it was worked the 
 average marks of the first third of the class 
 seldom got any nearer 5 than 1.30. Greek ap- 
 peared as mental pabulum in nine of the 12 terms, 
 and Latin in 8, and what was the matter with the 
 other 3 or 4 terms I can not tell. The Calculus, 
 differential and integral, was required, and 
 imagination supplies the sequel. A year or two 
 later a faculty who evidently could not live up to 
 their stern responsibilities made a course in 
 French "optional" with the Calculus. 
 
 The college modernist will be surprised, per- 
 haps incredulous, when I tell him that among 
 the early exhibits to the freshmen were the ''class 
 leaders" (in scholarship). There would be little 
 appreciation today of the joke much enjoyed 
 around the College, that when old Spuds was 
 asked by Professor Parker what ''ambrosia" 
 meant, he replied "the hair oil of the gods" ; nor 
 that Percy was called "Spondee" because he had 
 two long feet. When some flippant youth read- 
 ing Horace to Professor Parker translated "sim- 
 plex munditiis" "neat but not gaudy" that good 
 man with a smile and lingering loving accent re- 
 peated, "simplex munditiis, simple in her ele- 
 gance, a motto for every young lady's toilet, and 
 every young gentleman's too for that matter," 
 ending with a gentle chuckle. And that is about 
 as near to censure as he ever came. The constant 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 15 
 
 use of a word with so definite a technical meaning 
 as ''alibi" for ''excuse" would have jarred many 
 of us, and even now some of us object to the re- 
 current journalistic use of "aphasia" as loss of 
 memory. 
 
 The United Fraternity, known as Fraters, and 
 the Social Friends were still active organizations, 
 and all freshmen were assigned to one or the 
 other by alphabetical alternation. Thus they 
 kicked football upon the Campus to avoid the ex- 
 cessive tension of the Old Division (often called 
 Whole Division) game, which was Seniors and 
 Sophomores vs. Juniors and Freshmen. These 
 societies possessed libraries of nearly 9000 
 volumes each, and gave occasion for lively politics, 
 since the librarians were elected, drew salaries 
 and appointed assistants. They united in an 
 "Exhibition" just before Thanksgiving at which 
 our most talented seniors showed the world what 
 real poems and orations were. 
 
 There was also an official "Junior Exhibition" 
 in April at which the smart lads of the class 
 spoke pieces. This festival was made the oc- 
 casion of the distribution of mock programs sup- 
 posed to be the work of Sophomores, who were, 
 however, aided and abetted by the Seniors. These 
 were usually of an indelicate, coarse, smutty, 
 foetid, pornographic nature, if you know what I 
 mean. And as detection of the author meant im- 
 mediate extinction so far as college was con- 
 cerned, they were printed and circulated in 
 deepest secrecy. The most decent, I remember, 
 
16 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 announced that the procession would be headed 
 by President Smith riding on a cow, and that he 
 could be distinguished from the cow by his spec- 
 tacles. That so kindly a gentleman as President 
 Smith should be thus derided merely illustrates 
 the extent to which an alleged joke sometimes 
 befogs the youthful mind. I confess that I have 
 a number of these programs carefully put away. 
 Some remain from the distributions of half a 
 century ago and some have been sent me by 
 friends who doubtless feared to be caught with 
 the goods upon them. As peculiar historical 
 documents I have hated to destroy them ; but hav- 
 ing confessed so much I will further affirm that 
 I never saw any of them until they had been 
 printed and circulated. 
 
 The College library then numbered about 17,000 
 volumes and was as carefully guarded as the 
 United States Mint. 
 
 Perhaps I can avoid the usual class egotism by 
 mentioning only a few items of college life and 
 those either obsolete now or unusual at the time. 
 
 In the early days of the term we Freshmen 
 were notified to be on hand at a ''Shirt-tail" to be 
 held some time after the witching hour of mid- 
 night. The custom has survived in a form as 
 attenuated as is the length of pa jama jackets to 
 that of the ancient garment. A distinguished 
 New York doctor and I, with Freshman simplic- 
 ity, prepared our lessons together for the follow- 
 ing day (lectures in those days were few, and we 
 recited) with full intention of being among those 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 17 
 
 present, but the sandman overpowered our youth- 
 ful eyes and we went off to our beds. The affair 
 was highly obnoxious to the faculty, since it de- 
 veloped into a tin-horn serenade of a professor 
 who had been married during the summer — the 
 only case of the kind I have known in the College. 
 Missiles were flung and bad language used, as the 
 mob spirit prevailed. 
 
 Of that host of white-robed outlaws two 
 seniors and one freshman, conspicuous by a 
 pumpkin jack-o-lantern, were apprehended. It 
 was the fate of the freshman to be separated from 
 recitations for a period, though remaining in resi- 
 dence. The seniors were condemned to ''rustica- 
 tion," that is exiled to a selected place and tutor. 
 The tutor in these cases was usually a country 
 minister, and the exile was not so forlorn. Rural 
 society did not look severely upon college esca- 
 pades, and it is well known that out of New Eng- 
 land villages have come many of the country's 
 brightest and best. 
 
 I think these were the only victims of justice, 
 which was considered a huge joke around college; 
 but I suppose a great deal of college discipline has 
 to go this way. 
 
 The fraternity question was quickly and easily 
 settled. They held ''menageries" in those days, 
 which were more like the after-meetings of a re- 
 vival season than anything else. The fraternities 
 were Psi Upsilon, Kappa Kappa Kappa, Alpha 
 Delta Phi, and Delta Kappa Epsilon. A worthy 
 2 
 
18 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 little group who were in some way overlooked 
 established Theta Delta Chi, so that all the class 
 were gathered in, except two or three who stayed 
 out for religious or economic reasons. Another 
 fraternity was established a little later and the 
 Aegis wisely remarked that the College now had 
 all that it could support. 
 
 These were the days when flourished the Fresh- 
 man societies, Kappa Sigma Epsilon and Delta 
 Kappa. With our eyes tightly bandaged and in 
 lock-step we marched into the hall of torture. 
 The attendant demons who had been in college a 
 year longer greeted us with dreadful moans and 
 howls in sepulchral — I suppose sepulchral — voices 
 and occasional articulate warnings like ''Fresh- 
 man bewaaaare." I had been bidden by friendly 
 Sophomores to be of good heart as my body would 
 not be mutilated beyond recognition. As a matter 
 of fact most of us were not mussed up at all, 
 though we had to place our hands on an iron mitt, 
 which might have been red-hot but was not, to 
 take the dreadful oath. A few lewd fellows of 
 the baser sort having their victims blindfold and 
 helpless took the opportunity to imbed pins deeply 
 in the well-cushioned parts of certain freshmen 
 who had been blacklisted as too blatant, and to 
 administer sly pinches, and upon one they poured 
 water through a dirty stove-pipe, but there was 
 little ingenuity of torture in the proceedings. 
 These societies maintained debates and other 
 literary exercises for a part of the year, and 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 19 
 
 initiation into the fraternities took place a short 
 time before Commencement. 
 
 In the fall too we had a bad example set us 
 by a rebellion of '69, the senior class. Two of 
 that class were suspended for an affair that does 
 not seem at the present time a capital offense; 
 and at the 11 o'clock recitation hour the class as- 
 sembled in front of the Old Chapel with carriage 
 and music and escorted the exiles to the station. 
 According to my recollection, Harry Smith, son 
 of the President, who was in a difficult relation, 
 and another of marked and independent disposi- 
 tion attended the recitation, noble but lonesome. 
 Then followed suspension of all the truants, great 
 excitement, mass meetings in which eloquence was 
 unsuccessfully used to persuade the whole college 
 to join in a sympathetic strike, the resolution of 
 the whole senior class to shake off the dust, let- 
 ters from parents, sober second thoughts, then 
 gradual, later rapid, return of the whole class in 
 apologetic mood to their duties. This might open 
 a discussion of college discipline, but will not. It 
 may be observed that some disciplinary actions 
 are inevitable and indisputable, while others, 
 from the point of view of twenty-one, are open 
 to argument and must not be executed summarily. 
 
 I forbear to tell how Worthen, later called 
 Tute, carried a cane to chapel and on demand 
 properly surrendered it to President Smith, or of 
 the gigantic struggles with '71, because such 
 matters are in some form a precious remembrance 
 of all classes and a bore to all the others. 
 
20 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 But in this sketch which is static rather than 
 progressive, a cross section rather than a pan- 
 orama, I can give an exact view of our athletics 
 at the time. 
 
 There were legends of rowing, rumors of 
 rowing to come, but the second advent of rowing 
 really occurred about five years later. Paddling 
 on the river there was, for canoes had been in- 
 vented some years earlier. 
 
 Intercollegiate baseball was a feeble plant and 
 the games were few and casual. A little rudi- 
 mentary Aegis for 25 cents announces editorially 
 in what was thought to be a tone of discourage- 
 ment and bitterness, 'Tor sale, nine gray uni- 
 forms. The owners are sold already." But it 
 was a grand era for the intramural game; five 
 and even six games often raged at once upon the 
 campus and that same Aegis and others enrolled 
 ten or twelve organized ''nines" of one kind and 
 another, besides those that merely played and 
 howled. 
 
 At that time the pitcher was restricted to a 
 straight arm underhand pitch, but he was only 
 45 feet from the batter and was allowed nine 
 balls. Runners were not allowed to overrun 1st 
 base; fouls counted for nothing unless they were 
 caught in the air or on the first bound. Only 
 babies wore gloves : that is, they were not worn. 
 Catchers had neither mask nor chest protector. 
 The catcher played up to the bat after the second 
 strike or, if he was pretty nervy, when there was 
 a runner on the bases. Every catcher received 
 
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22 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 one or more foul tips on his features during the 
 season. I have a photograph now of my class 
 nine in which the catcher exposes his profile in 
 order to conceal a scrambled eye. As the ball 
 was hard and lively and hit with all the violence 
 of brawny men, baseball was somewhat more an 
 heroic adventure than at present. 
 
 Football was simplicity itself. You ran all over 
 the campus, and when, as, and if you got a chance 
 you kicked a round rubber ball to the east or to 
 the west. You might run all the afternoon and 
 not get your toe upon the ball, but you could not 
 deny that you had had a fair chance, and the 
 exercise was yours and could be valued by the 
 number of hot rolls consumed at the evening meal. 
 The game was played by two or by two hundred. 
 You always knew in which direction to kick be- 
 cause you were bound to know whether you were 
 a Frater or a Social. The game could be played 
 half an hour or all the afternoon; some dropped 
 out, others dropped in. It was especially adapted 
 to the half-hour between 12 when recitations 
 closed and 12 :30 when the dinner bell rang. It 
 was glorious for exercise, and had enough excite- 
 ment to make it highly interesting. It gave ample 
 opportunity for competitions in speed, finesse, 
 dodging, endurance, and occasional personal colli- 
 sions. For a year the faculty in its inscrutable 
 wisdom debarred this highly useful game because 
 of abuses, as they thought, in the manner of 
 playing it. In my junior year I was one of a 
 committee sent by the College to ask the President 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 23 
 
 please couldn't we play the game again if we 
 would be good ; and he, after taking counsel, said 
 yes. 
 
 Croquet, affected by seniors in their last term, 
 was regarded as effeminate, but from the lan- 
 guage occasionally overheard it may have been 
 a virile game after all. 
 
 There was always walking, and plenty of it. 
 
 For most the winter was a rather close season. 
 Instead of the toboggan the snowshoe and the ski, 
 the ''double runner" dashed down the hilly roads 
 which lead outward from the village in each di- 
 rection. I suspect that coasting on the roads was 
 unlawful, but it was done ; and there was nothing 
 tame about it in going down nor easy about it in 
 going up. The writer has done all the hills in- 
 cluding Balch's, though part of that was rolling. 
 
 Hockey was played when there was good ice 
 upon the river, but under the name of "shinney." 
 There was no pond where is now ''Faculty pond" 
 or "Occom pond." Many years ago a pond must 
 have been there, but it had become undammed. 
 The present pond was recovered by a dam thrown 
 across in 1899. 
 
II 
 
 THE VILLAGE 
 
 The impression which the village of Hanover 
 made on a freshman in 1868 was permanent, but 
 it was deepened on his return ten years later to 
 the same village almost unchanged in the interval. 
 A remote rural hamlet of the 18th century it was. 
 On consideration, it is remote now — almost the 
 most remote place in New England by measure 
 of geography and railway connections, but it has 
 lost somewhat its scenic fitness for a moving 
 picture of the ''Elegy in a Country Churchyard." 
 The entrance over the Ledyard Bridge and up the 
 hill suggested the familiar ''Let him who enters 
 here leave hope behind." West Wheelock street, 
 of course without church or fraternity houses, 
 was the abode of staid householders glad of the 
 financial increment from renting rooms to 
 students. President Smith lived in the house now 
 occupied by Mr. Randall. And I shall never for- 
 get the hospitable house of President Brown, 
 wherein I ate my first Hanover supper and 
 cheered up. It stood on the site of College Hall, 
 facing south; later it tripped over to East 
 Wheelock street and became the home of Dr. C. 
 P. Frost; and now the Chi Phi Fraternity has it. 
 The little brick building occupied by the Stock- 
 bridge Association was the whole and only school- 
 house. Webster avenue was not laid out and 
 
 (24) 
 
CO 
 
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26 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 there were no buildings to the northwest of its 
 present location. There were only two or three 
 little houses in the region northerly from May- 
 nard street, and these later gave way to the 
 Hospital. There were no houses on Park street, 
 and the southeast and southwest corners of the 
 village had not yet been filled in. 
 
 There were walks by the sides of the road, but 
 no sidewalks, and in the spring rubber boots were 
 both genteel and necessary. Everyone wore them, 
 and if invited to a party one might with propriety 
 take along slippers in a bag. A few kerosene 
 lamps made the darkness of night visible, but the 
 wise citizen traveled about the streets guided by 
 his own lantern. The only water supplies were 
 the heavens directly into cisterns, and spring 
 water coming from over the hill towards Lebanon 
 in a lead main of about 11/2 inches caliber, dis- 
 tributed in ''shares" by a perpetually running 
 pin-hole stream, and stored in an alcohol barrel or 
 a cement cistern. A share for a family was about 
 40 gallons a day. This seems ample to the un- 
 calculating, and it would be ample if the family 
 drank it all; but the average use and waste of 
 water today is 80 to 100 gallons per individual. 
 The head was enough to force the stream to the 
 ground floor and no higher. There were a few 
 larger reservoirs at some of the street corners 
 for fire purposes, but under the circumstances 
 when a house took fire it was expected to burn to 
 the ground. The college buildings were supplied 
 from a well on the campus not far from the north 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 27 
 
 door of Reed Hall, — supplied, that is, when the 
 pitcher went to the well and came back safely. 
 And, it is true, as rumored, that cuspidors, then 
 called spittoons, were washed on the pervious 
 boards that covered the well. Naturally precau- 
 tions against excessive application of water to the 
 bare skin were not necessary. I have it on good 
 living authority that when John Doe, who roomed 
 in Thornton, announced v/ith pride and perhaps 
 some trepidation that he was heating water for 
 a bath, a half-dozen or so of his more intimate 
 friends gathered to make sure that there was no 
 evasion of the unusual function. At about this 
 time one house in the village was equipped with 
 a force pump and a regular bathroom, but it was 
 regarded as a dubious luxury and caused much 
 comment. 
 
 There is reason to think that there was talk 
 anyway. One of the subjects of debate was 
 whether it was at any time proper for a woman 
 to walk across the campus, and if so, when. 
 Much later some of the more frivolous members 
 of the faculty took up tennis, and capered around 
 after a dressed-up rubber ball. After serious dis- 
 cussion it was allowed that if they would not wear 
 outlandish clothes that showed their legs perhaps 
 they could play the game without too much loss 
 of dignity. This was in the period when min- 
 isters, teachers and fathers were yet required ''to 
 set a good example." And (with a little latitude 
 of time) students wearing neat green knicker- 
 bockers were debarred from some recitation 
 
^8 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 rooms. I have a mental, I wish it were photo- 
 graphic, picture of an afterward-distinguished 
 son of Dartmouth attending church service in a 
 stove-pipe hat, a swallow-tailed coat, knee 
 breeches and long white hose, nevertheless. An 
 older resident inquired of a new comer in a 
 cautious whisper, '*Do you ever do such a thing 
 as play cards?" There are members of my class 
 who will always believe that the reason why the 
 gas went out at our graduating reception (for in 
 1872 there was a kind of gas) was to suppress 
 in a polite manner a little indiscriminate dancing 
 which had spontaneously developed. 
 
 The campus, as everyone knows, was fenced. 
 It yielded a fair crop of hay just before Com- 
 mencement and a scant rowan before the opening 
 of the fall term. This was a period, too, when 
 the surrounding rural population as well as peri- 
 patetic fakers, mountebanks and hucksters con- 
 tinued to take great interest in Commencement, 
 maintaining a lusty midway plaisance, on a small 
 scale, at the south end of the campus, outside the 
 fence. And the custom early noted here of the 
 lads and lasses wandering about hand-in-hand 
 was not yet obsolete. 
 
 There were no sewers in the place, and drainage 
 was into cesspools or upon the surface of the 
 ground. Why mention a gruesome matter so re- 
 mote from culture? But culture cannot be sepa- 
 rated from material conditions. The drainage 
 and the drinking water and the culture were con- 
 tinually getting mixed, especially in the fall of 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 29 
 
 the year; and the Bacillus Typhosis flourished 
 
 like the green bay tree. One hundred cases of 
 
 typhoid was, I believe, the record in one season. 
 
 Fever suggests doctors. The medical lectures 
 
 Main St., East Side, Looking North 
 
 began early in August and continued till about 
 the first of November bringing a number of dis- 
 tinguished specialists to the village for the period 
 of their lectures; but resident physicians were 
 few. Before we had finished our course Dr. 
 Carlton P. Frost had come here to live; but from 
 the beginning I can remember only Dr. ''Ben" 
 
30 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Crosby, who, I think, did not spend all his time 
 here, and Dr. Dixi Crosby, an old man then, who 
 lived in the Crosby House. I had occasion to 
 consult him twice, — once for an obstinate case 
 
 Main St., West Side, Looking North 
 
 of ivy poisoning, for which I remember he pre- 
 scribed ''Goulard's extract," purchasable at 
 Deacon Downing's pharmacy, and once for a very 
 painful felon in the palm of the hand, starting 
 from a baseball bruise. After exhausting the 
 "soft answer," that is "mush" (poultices), he re- 
 sorted to the steel; upon which silence, for 
 rhetorical effect. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 31 
 
 Eating clubs had much more of the club-like 
 nature than at present. A ''commissary" se- 
 cured members and supervised accounts; a work- 
 ing housekeeper, for a fixed sum per mouth 
 filled — about 50c a week — provided room, fur- 
 nishings, and cooking; waiters served for their 
 board; and the cost of the food was assessed. It 
 was possible to eat with a fair chance of sustain- 
 ing life for $2.50 a week without tea or coffee; 
 and the maximum of nutritive and gustatory 
 luxury could be enjoyed for $4.25 to $4.50. It 
 was, however, as it is now, largely a matter of 
 hasty stoking-up regardless of the refining and 
 esthetic infiuence of feeding under gentle and 
 social conditions ; and it produced a class of hasty 
 gobblers with whom it is impossible for civilized 
 eaters to keep pace. The breakfast menu, to con- 
 quer which has always been a race against time, 
 was, to the best of my memory, one slab of alleged 
 beefsteak, one piping hot baked potato, as many 
 hot rolls as time permitted, and as a staple the 
 pale anemic raised doughnut, shrewdly con- 
 structed without the sugar which in the hot fat 
 develops the rich caramel color of the true or 
 mother's variety, but which was soaked in or 
 washed down by huge draughts of sugar-sat- 
 urated coffee. The bills of fare for the rest of 
 the day are less vivid now, a little more varied 
 it is true, but based on the theory of substance 
 before art, and favoring the adolescent hankering 
 for milk and then some more milk, and pie. 
 
 My memory about ardent spirits — the demon 
 
=5 
 
 I 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 33 
 
 rum, or good red liquor, as you prefer — is 
 vague. I know a decent-appearing, white-haired 
 grandpa, rightly called ''Judge" by many, who 
 tells how, when a thirsty soul from the suburbs 
 came inquiring around where he could get it, they 
 directed him with care and secrecy to the house 
 of Dr. Leeds; and he, the teller, chuckles over it 
 yet. 
 
 I suppose that at the glacial period under con- 
 sideration some coal came into Hanover, but if 
 that was the case I never knew it. All the 
 furnaces I knew burned wood and were bad 
 actors. They smoked, as did none of the faculty. 
 The stove was the fire king. And there were two 
 kinds of stoves — the ''airtight," with side 
 entrance, used in homes, one in each inhabited 
 room, and the box or rectangular stove appro- 
 priate to recitation rooms and railway stations, 
 stoked by lifting a hinged top that often slipped 
 with great clatter, especially during recitations. 
 The reliable old air-tight delivered the goods. It 
 was adapted to slow over-night carbonization or 
 to immediate incandescence which would raise 
 the temperature of an ordinary room to 90° while 
 you were breaking the ice in the water pitcher. 
 And the anti-tuberculous distillate of creosote, 
 far more wholesome than the sulphur-bearing 
 coal gas, is reminiscent in many Hanover houses 
 to the present day. Good rock maple wood was 
 abundant, and after sawing and splitting was 
 carefully stored away before nightfall ; for it was 
 
34 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 one of those commodities which from time to time 
 inherit a fashion of vanishing away, like um- 
 brellas, house numbers, garments from the 
 clothes-line, turkeys, text-books, and so forth, 
 each in turn. Often on the winter afternoons 
 four or five ox teams, the sleds loaded with **four- 
 foot" wood, stood in the street near the hotel, and 
 as darkness approached and sales were slow, the 
 price for a cord came down to $3.75 or even $3.50 
 so that the driver might get home in time to do 
 the chores. 
 
 The houses were migratory as has been told; 
 and in further illustration of the slight union of 
 buildings and their sites — from the Inn to the 
 Bank only two lots are occupied by the buildings 
 of 1868, that of the express office, and of the 
 dwelling beyond; while on the other side of the 
 street, from and including the Administration 
 building to the little chapel of St. Thomas' 
 Church, only two others, **Uncle Jo" Emerson's 
 occupied by the Casque and Gauntlet and the 
 Walker house across the lane from the post office, 
 now remain. And everywhere the material prog- 
 ress of the College has been attended by houses 
 on wheels playing "Puss-in-the-Corner," or houses 
 in wagons traveling to the salvage heap. 
 
 The 'Tontine," besides serving as a business 
 center, was the home of several fraternities — 
 six at the time of its destruction by fire in 1887. 
 I can speak only for my own, quartered in a high 
 and dignified room extending from front to rear 
 of the building and provided with ante-room and 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 35 
 
 '*giiard-room." Here we gathered to supplement 
 the meager curriculum with debates, ''conversa- 
 tions," book reviews, essays and the reading of 
 plays. The old ways are neither possible nor 
 necessary now. Fellowship and hospitality have 
 taken the place of earnestness in self-improve- 
 ment; but no alumni can look back on their 
 fraternity life with warmer affection than those 
 of that period. How we fed on the wisdom of 
 the great minds a year or so ahead of us! And 
 how we sung, with devilish glee, even so wanton 
 a song as 'Then when our little ones come on. 
 We'll brand them all Psi Upsilon," evidently to 
 the encouragement of legacies. And once a year, 
 at the initiation feast, came forth the unwonted 
 cigar to be cautiously burned perhaps near an 
 open window. Those enjoying the usufruct of 
 scholarship funds at the expense of the "iron 
 clad" pledge agreed with Rip Van Winkle that 
 "this time does not count." 
 
 No one can speak with accuracy of Hanover's 
 business men from the impressions of a fresh- 
 man; but "the street" in 1868 had little of its 
 present complexity. Dean today of all the mer- 
 chants, George W. Rand had arrived in December, 
 1865, which is close after the Civil War; and long 
 may he continue. Deacon Downing came soon 
 after and was genially presiding over a little 
 pharmacy in a wooden building about where 
 Storrs' bookstore is now. Fruit was one of the 
 scarcest articles in Hanover, and upon the 
 Deacon's counter stood a wire basket of at- 
 
36 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 tractive apples a penny each, or, if you did not 
 pick the largest, six for five cents. Newton S. 
 Huntington had organized the National bank, and 
 was also carrying on a savings bank which had 
 been started by Elder Richardson. The Frarys 
 and their ever-to-be-remembered tavern held im- 
 portant place in the community. In Cobb's gen- 
 eral store you could buy anything, if Mr. Cobb, 
 who did not like to be bothered, or his clerk, could 
 find it. Clough & Storrs ran another general 
 store. Later E. P. Storrs, long one of Hanover's 
 most respected citizens, took over the Dartmouth 
 Bookstore from N. A. McClary and carried it on 
 for many years. E. D. Carpenter made good 
 clothes, and Ballou, a dashing young blade, helped 
 him. "Bill" Gibbs also tailored. I cannot recall 
 that metropolitan houses had yet discovered that 
 Dartmouth students had money to spend. How 
 could they when two-thirds or more of them were 
 teaching school twelve weeks in the winter at 
 from $40 to $60 a month paying board, and at 
 $25 and upwards ''boarding around"? Parker 
 had the bookstore, and Major Wainwright the tin 
 shop, for there wasn't much plumbing. M. M. 
 Amaral came about this time, though the inven- 
 tion of Para Caspa was yet to come. P. H. Whit- 
 comb ran the printing office, and it was believed 
 around college that the correction of an error in 
 proof resulted in two errors in the revise. On 
 press days Whitcomb used man power and it was 
 also reputed that the long and lank John Suse 
 was the only man in Hanover strong enough to 
 
S8 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 furnish it. Smith's bakery had been in Hanover 
 many years, and Smith, it is said, first brought 
 anthracite coal into Hanover. It was H. 0. Bly 
 who took the pictures, and as business was not 
 always pressing he was closely associated with a 
 pipe and a bench outside his door. Dr. James 
 Newton, in the Phi Gamma Delta House, pulled 
 and replaced teeth ; and his parlor was a center 
 of amateur music, although in that respect there 
 was no connection between vocation and avoca- 
 tion. Of course Ira Allen supplied the equine 
 transportation. Once, summoned from the street 
 to witness a legal paper, I visited the chaotic lair 
 of Squire Duncan, over Cobb's store. He was 
 then ancient beyond my youthful comprehension. 
 I knew him much better ten years later. 
 
 I must give a special paragraph to Jason Dud- 
 ley, whose era was from 1812 to 1893. 
 
 In his early days he was chief engineer of a 
 stage coach and once drove my father into Han- 
 over. At a later time my father recalled it and 
 complimented Jason on the safe completion of 
 the journey, to which Jason responded '*You 
 never said a truer thing in any of your sermons 
 than that." 
 
 His real joy he found in his chosen profession 
 — driver of the Hanover hearse — of which he 
 took the broadest view. One of Hanover's bril- 
 liant daughters, Mildred Crosby Lindsay, has 
 given me some of her recollections. Mrs. Lindsay 
 writes, '*I think all names but the Crosbys' should 
 be suppressed. No Crosby was ever sensitive 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 39 
 
 about a good story." And reluctantly I accept 
 her judgment — for the most part. Mrs. Ed- 
 wards, in the cemetery arranging for the inter- 
 ment of her aged aunt, Mrs. Johns, said, ''I 
 think, Mr. Dudley, that by placing auntie's head 
 this way by uncle's feet you could make room for 
 her and for a small headstone." ''Well, Miss Ed- 
 wards, this aint no sardine packin' factory, and 
 while I am the head of this cem'tery heads will 
 match heads or the old woman won't be planted," 
 replied Jason, and the matter was settled. 
 
 And Mrs. Edwards in eulogy of the uncle, the 
 elegant Professor Johns, declared, *'It was a great 
 loss to the college, and the village, when he paid 
 the debt to nature." ''Well, I swan," roared 
 Jason, "if he paid the debt to nature it was the 
 fust debt he ever paid; old Duncan never could 
 see how he kept out of jail." 
 
 Meeting one day the healthy collector of these 
 sayings, who has survived him many years, he 
 said cheerfully, "I done some measuring down to 
 your lot today and if we bury you in the north 
 corner of the lot in the curve where we calculated 
 to, your legs will be part in the highway. We 
 was lottin' on your bein' short like your mother, 
 but you got one of those figgers that nothin' stops 
 your waist but your heels." 
 
 He said deacon Jacobs was considerable of a 
 jellyfish with the ladies. He added that he under- 
 stood there was something on his tombstone about 
 his thinking more about God than he did about 
 his food. "By gorry, the man that wrote that 
 
40 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 never see the deacon eat good victuals," was his 
 emphatic comment. 
 
 When elder Charles, a paralytic, died Jason 
 said, '*We all ought to jine in singing 'Thou art 
 gone to the grave, but we will not deplore thee !' " 
 
 Reflecting upon the effect of a great granite 
 stone placed over the grave of Dr. Asa Crosby, 
 he said to Mrs. Lindsay's father. Dr. Ben Crosby, 
 **Asa will be some late for the Resurrection, and 
 it is a pity for he is the one Crosby you can count 
 on gittin' in." One day when Jason had the 
 funeral horse in the buggy and was giving his 
 young friend a ride, he flicked the sedate beast 
 with the whip and caused it to trot. His com- 
 panion protested that this might unfit the animal 
 for its more serious duties. ^'Mildred," said 
 Ja;£on, ''don't you suppose that horse knows the 
 difference between you and a corpse?" 
 
 Dr. Ben Crosby, a noted after-dinner speaker, 
 much younger than Jason, once introduced him 
 at the Century Club in New York as a prince of 
 story tellers and his own greatly feared rival. 
 When Jason rose to respond he relieved the doc- 
 tor's fears thus: "Don't be a mite scared, Ben; 
 dog don't eat puppy in the class I've travelled 
 with." 
 
 There must be a limit to the space that can be 
 given to this quaint person. Said he, "I never 
 seed your grandmother consarned mad but jest 
 twice; once when they was rowin' about the 
 bridge and arrested the old doctor and put him 
 in jail over at Woodstock; and he sent a man 
 
J3 
 bo 
 
 bfl 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 
42 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 clear over from Woodstock to break it gently to 
 his grass-widder. And the man said, 'Don't be 
 askin' for your husband, Mum, for they have 
 jailed the old fool in Woodstock, and as far as I 
 am concerned I hope the old New Hampshire idiot 
 will stay there' ; and the other time was when 
 she got all ready for a big family funeral — 
 cakes, mince pies, ham, calves' head soups, etc., 
 and I myself had fetched the coffin stands up and 
 she met me at the door, mad clear through; *Mr. 
 Dudley,' says she, 'there will be no funeral ; the 
 corpse has rallied.' " 
 
Ill 
 
 THE DARTMOUTH HOTEL 
 
 As I consult my trusty and life-saving account 
 book I see that in the autumn of 1879 we entered 
 upon a two years' term in the Dartmouth Hotel, 
 at the price of $12 a week. It cannot be claimed 
 that this was before the Centennial, but the con- 
 ditions were. Things equal to each other are 
 equal to the same thing ; and there can have been 
 no radical change in that important institution 
 since Horace Frary nominally took over its man- 
 agement, according to Judge Chase, in 1857. 
 
 I had lived there previously for some months, 
 evidently in need of a guardian ; for 35 years later 
 one of those sinners who show no mark of early 
 crime, in the course of an agreeable call at my 
 house confessed (or maybe boasted) of abstract- 
 ing samples of a primitive set of examination 
 questions from my room during that period. I 
 could only answer meekly that I never should 
 have guessed it from the papers handed in. It 
 was another case of Cherchez la feynme. Charged 
 with the duty of caring for my room, this person, 
 whose identity I cannot recall, extended her sym- 
 pathy to my classes. 
 
 Twelve dollars a week, not for one person but 
 for two — that is, to have no ambiguity, six dol- 
 lars each — was the price of two rooms, one of 
 them on the Green side of the house, with light, 
 
 (43) 
 
44 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 heat, food, service, and such other comforts or 
 joys as the house afforded, which included that 
 imaginary stimulus to high thinking — plain liv- 
 ing — and the right to sit around the office stove. 
 
 The Dartmouth Hotel, 1866 
 
 There were about eight residing guests, and as 
 many more came in from without for food. 
 
 It is difficult now to find a country hotel so free 
 from the tasteful, the dainty, the homelike. One 
 would almost conclude that it was planned, fur- 
 nished and managed to drive its guests to homes 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 45 
 
 of their own. It was, however, slowly moving. 
 Steam heat had been introduced, which gave op- 
 portunity to point with pride for at least a 
 decade. 
 
 The building consisted of two great barracks, 
 the corner one of brick, the inner of wood, joined 
 in the middle and deeply recessed between. The 
 office and the lobby were approximately where 
 are those of the present Inn. The dining room 
 was long and narrow and dark, with two windows 
 opening on the alley in the rear and two on the 
 ever bleak recess between the two buildings. It 
 had a blue-painted floor, chairs of the fashion 
 called ''kitchen, " long three-feet tables, and an 
 austere regimen. At the front of the wooden 
 building on the ground floor was a huge room 
 called the store room. Here in earlier times was 
 spread the alumni dinner, and sometimes it was 
 a place for entertainments. One summer when 
 many young people were in town, Gilbert and 
 Sullivan's "Patience" was rehearsed and pre- 
 sented in it with the usual trials and triumphs 
 of amateur performances, well worth while. Into 
 the older half the steam heat had been introduced 
 with huge painted radiators, flat and indented, 
 which knocked and hammered like riveting ma- 
 chines and met emergencies so poorly, partly 
 through lack of fuel — there was no parsimony 
 about it but some one went to sleep when he 
 should have been firing up — that dwellers in 
 that part of the house were often fain to come and 
 
46 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 sit by the old reliable air-tight where it was 
 warm. 
 
 The hall up stairs was a letter H, the cross-bar 
 running east and west. It was cut by a door and 
 all but the western arm was unheated in the 
 winter. The rooms were spacious. There was 
 no plumbing in the house. It was possible for 
 the guests to keep clean, but not by getting into 
 a tub. One can only hint at the seasonal discom- 
 forts of summer and winter.* 
 
 The proprietor, Horace, better known as 
 **Hod," was of silvery locks, soft speech, and 
 saintly appearance. I have no disposition to con- 
 trovert those who ascribe to him great power in 
 supervigorous language. There are too many 
 citations, though there is monotony in the quot- 
 able ones. He tore down the porch on the Main 
 Street side of the house because, it is reported, 
 ''those damned students made so much noise that 
 he could not sleep." He was ailing and his wife 
 suggested that Dr. Frost should be summoned. 
 ''Damn it," said Hod, "this is no time to be send- 
 ing for a doctor. Fm sick." In his last illness, 
 with failing breath he struggled for speech ; Mrs. 
 Frary bent a kindly listening ear, "Did you want 
 to say something, Horace?" And "You make 
 that damned old * * * pay his bill," were 
 his last words. These are the stories. However, 
 
 * This building was complete!}' destroyed by fire in January. 
 1887. The hotel which succeeded it, built and owned by the 
 College, was called "The Wheelock," and the Wheelock some- 
 what reconstructed is the present Hanover Inn. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 47 
 
 during two years of association with him I heard 
 very few words from him, and none that were 
 not befitting a perfect gentleman. I did not hear 
 what he said when his peculiar and uncertain 
 temper had been aroused, or when he stood coat- 
 
 
 The Dartmouth Hotel, from N. W. Comer of the Green, later 
 
 less and hatless in the coldest weather, at the 
 tail of the meat cart bargaining for joints to feed 
 people who never stayed fed longer than over 
 night. 
 
 Mr. Frary took the Boston Joiirrial as others 
 took alcohol or stimulating drugs. As he read it 
 he growled and muttered, grew violently excited, 
 
48 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 and finally flung the paper as far as he could 
 across the room. No persuasion could induce him 
 to change to a less irritating source of news. His 
 behavior was far worse than that of the young 
 miss of Black Bay, 
 
 "Whose conduct was very blase ; 
 While yet in her teens 
 She refused pork and beans, 
 And once threw a Transcript away." 
 
 Yes, he carved, very skilfully, in his shirt 
 sleeves, and with his back towards the pensioners. 
 Knowing the legend, we watched furtively and 
 anxiously to discover whether he did wipe either 
 his nose or his knife on his vest. The verdict was 
 **not proven, but change your vest." 
 
 There was a clerk whose name was not Rufus, 
 hard worked and reluctant. Perhaps the greatest 
 sorrow of his life was having to sell six five-cent 
 see-gars for a quarter. Next to that was the 
 grievance of letting anyone into the house after 
 10 p. m. 
 
 But whatever Hod or the clerk whose name was 
 not Rufus may have done or have been in the 
 stable, the lobby, or the street, the autocrat of the 
 breakfast table and all the tables was Mrs. Frary, 
 whose given but unused name was Amelia; and 
 she maintained her authority by constant 
 presence, eagle vision, disconcertingly acute hear- 
 ing, a far-carrying voice that never missed, and 
 a firm conviction that she was responsible not 
 only for our nutrition but also for our manners 
 and morals. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 49 
 
 Very tall and very spare and very straight and 
 very angular, with a neat brown-haired head- 
 covering about which there was no deception (un- 
 less there were two) curving from a broad part- 
 ing low to the ears, and with slippers always down 
 at the heel, she shuffled rhythmically from one end 
 
 A Nearer View 
 
 of the room to the other bearing food, supervis- 
 ing, warning, commanding, seldom comforting. 
 Her thin face with its down-curving lines was al- 
 ways serious. If you ventured to jest, an ap- 
 preciative gleam would come into her eyes, and 
 if she was in very amiable mood she would let it 
 go without comment; on less favorable days she 
 would repeat and dissect it in a loud clear flat 
 
50 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 voice to the intense but suppressed delight of 
 every one in the dining-room except the joker. 
 
 George Eliot declares that a difference of taste 
 in jokes is a great strain on the affections. The 
 autocrat had her own taste. Did you especially 
 object to the flavor of sage you might hear her 
 compelling voice, ''Give him plenty of the turkey 
 stuffing, Angelina." She nearly reduced a mother 
 to tears by commenting loudly on the inebriated 
 condition in which the mother's son came in the 
 night before, and she continued the subject at 
 intervals for a week, though every one knew that 
 while late the young man was not drunk. Early 
 one July morning a small new boarder came into 
 the house. This Mrs. Frary announced to the 
 breakfasting boarders by the remark in her long 
 range voice to relatives of the debutante, ''It was 
 rather frosty early this morning, wasn't it?" A 
 stranger demanded a bath and his case was re- 
 ferred to Mrs. Frary and disposed of thus, "You 
 want a bath? Didn't you see the river when you 
 came up from the depot?" 
 
 And you were expected to eat what she allotted 
 to you. You asked for bread and she was likely 
 to shuffle over to you and inquire, always in the 
 far-carrying voice, "What ails the biscuit this 
 morning? I made them myself." Angelina said, 
 "Pork chop, sausage, and meat and tater hash," 
 and you expressed a preference for sausage, to 
 hear, "Guess you better have meat and tater hash ; 
 sausage might not suit you." Or you heard, 
 "Hot coffee? If he wants his coffee hot he better 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 51 
 
 come earlier to his breakfast." A veteran 
 boarder requested underdone meat one day, and 
 we heard from the region of the serving table, 
 *'You take him back this; raw meat ain't good 
 for him." A reckless traveling man actually took 
 exception to the food that was brought him and 
 sent it back. Our first notice of it was, ''Hey! 
 what ails it?" Then taking the plate in her own 
 hands she marched with flapping heels upon the 
 daring man. We grasped the sides of our chairs 
 and listened. ''Say, what's the matter of this? 
 Aint it good enough for you?" He looked up, 
 then muttered something inaudible even in the 
 supernatural stillness of the room. "Well, it's the 
 best we got; I suppose you needn't eat it if you 
 don't want it." But he took it. Whenever she 
 thus crushed an upstart, an appreciative twinkle 
 lingered in her glances for a minute or two. 
 
 Who of the time will forget the sentence of 
 expulsion solemnly pronounced and executed on 
 Squire Duncan, brother-in-law of Rufus Choate, 
 and McClary of the bookstore, for habitual and 
 incorrigible tardiness at breakfast. But they 
 were almost as much fixtures of the house as Mrs. 
 Frary herself, and after missing them for a week 
 she changed her mind and called them back. 
 
 When the few festal days of the College arrived 
 Mrs. Frary came into her own. The great ones 
 of the earth, the trustees and judges and gov- 
 ernors, placed their feet under her mahogany, 
 and in some instances made rapid plays with their 
 knives, but there was no servility in Mrs. Frary's 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 5S 
 
 manner, although we common feeders were made 
 to see distinctly that the real thing had come 
 and that the tavern was now serving its highest 
 ends. "Vm getting along about as usual, judge; 
 I hope your rheumatism is better." "Will you 
 have meat pie or rice pudding, doctor?" "We 
 have some nice haddock fish today, governor; 
 shall I bring you some?" all conveyed a fine sense 
 of social equality weighted with appreciation of 
 their temporary alimentary dependence. (We 
 never were quite clear why it was always "had- 
 dock fish" that was offered, but the most pro'Aible 
 theory is that the discrimination thus suggested 
 was a delicate courtesy to Professor Haddock's 
 aged widow who was a distinguished and stately 
 boarder. Her egg, by the way, was a well-known 
 feature of the breakfast, because, being deaf, she 
 did not know that the tinkling as she stirred it 
 in the glass was loud enough to obscure the chapel 
 bell. She was a good sport, and when in the 
 panicky time of the fire Mr. Henry Rood hastened 
 to her rescue with the word that unless she hur- 
 ried it was uncertain whether she could get out, 
 she replied, "Harry Rood, I've never hurried in 
 my life, and I'm not going to begin now," and 
 fully dressed and composed she took his arm and 
 marched through the smoke into safety.) 
 
 But the gentler elements were mixed in Mrs. 
 Frary, and if one could penetrate to the great 
 clean kitchen and find her, a prudent Penelope, 
 sitting with the weary flat feet in an otherwise 
 vacant oven, while she regulated the maids with 
 
54 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 eye and voice, it might be that any request even 
 to cake or oysters in the evening would be 
 granted. If, as sometimes happened, a genuine 
 liking for some boarding lady took hold of her, 
 that one might even come into the kitchen and 
 make things, or have toast at supper. She was 
 a constant friend to the poor; and impecunious 
 boarders touched her sympathy, especially if the 
 bill was old and large. That baby born on the 
 frosty summer morning fetched her, and for the 
 only known time in two years she climbed the 
 stairs all the way from the first to the second 
 floor to pay a visit and to see her have her bath. 
 The food materials were generally good. The 
 chef was about average Yankee, neither best nor 
 worst. Options in food were not much en- 
 couraged. There were certain memorable fixtures 
 — fish on Friday, baked beans and brown bread 
 Saturday night, fish cakes Sunday morning, 
 oyster soup and chicken or turkey Sunday noon, 
 all of course. And there were some immutable 
 grievances. Some people love sage and some hate 
 it ; but it was a constant and abundant constituent 
 of that part of fowls which is so generously 
 given out in hotels and boarding houses, the 
 stuffing. There is a humane invention of the 
 clever chemist known as baking-powder, in which 
 the gas-giving compounds are shrewdly mixed to 
 baffle culinary recklessness. Before its day, when 
 the neat-handed Phyllis or the sturdy Mary Ann 
 came in from the afternoon out and rushed to stir 
 up "soda biscuit" for supper, she made sure of 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 55 
 
 at least twice the necessary sal aeratus, with 
 grievous offense to sight and taste in the product. 
 Yeast was strictly domestic in those days. Like 
 the fire of the Vestal Virgins the home-made sup- 
 ply was never allowed to get out. Or perhaps a 
 lump of dough was carried over from one rising 
 to the next. Thus besides the proper alcoholic 
 ferment much ''wild yeast" was propagated to 
 make acetic acid and lactic acid and other acids, 
 and the bread was almost always sour. So no 
 gift more precious could be borne to anyone con- 
 demned to the hotel dietary than a loaf of genuine 
 home-made bread. It was an occasion for gloat- 
 ing. Many such gifts were made and remembered 
 to the present day. 
 
 I am permitted to record some of the ex- 
 periences and recollections of N. A. McClary '84, 
 who boarded at the Frary table for eight years 
 and roomed in the house for two. 
 
 "I have heard Mr. Duncan say that in his 
 younger days Mr. Frary was a very interesting 
 and attractive man. He had been a shoemaker 
 before he became a hotel keeper. He was re- 
 markably well-read and knew Shakespeare as few 
 men know him. Mr. Frary often had a volume 
 of Shakespeare open before him as he worked at 
 his bench and could repeat from memory long 
 passages. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, when he 
 was a professor in the Medical School, knew Mr. 
 Frary well and greatly enjoyed his society. Mr. 
 Duncan said that he frequently found Dr. Holmes 
 sitting in Mr. Frary's shop, the two discussing 
 
56 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Shakespeare while Mr. Frary pegged away at his 
 work. 
 
 ''I remember one day when Mr. Frary was at 
 the desk, as infrequently happened, a young minc- 
 ing sort of man, whom I guessed to be a New 
 Yorker, floated into the office with, 'Can I have 
 my shoes shined?' Mr. Frary leered at him but 
 did not answer. He repeated his question rather 
 insistently when Mr. Frary indicating the little 
 corner enclosure where the washstand was lo- 
 cated said. There's the blacking; shine them 
 yourself.' The New Yorker inspected the hard 
 worn-out brush and the empty blacking box and 
 coming out with the brush in hand ventured the 
 inquiry, 'Where can I find some blacking?' Then 
 the bolt fell. 'You damned fool! There's black- 
 ing enough on that brush now to shine a hundred 
 pairs of shoes.' I think that the incident was 
 rather characteristic of his attitude towards 
 guests." 
 
 (Yes, and of the employes. After any little 
 congestion of business there was a tendency to 
 speed the parting guests very quickly and then 
 give thanks. It might almost be said they were 
 ready with the swift kick). 
 
 "My personal relations with Mr. Frary were 
 rather friendly. I kept out of his way pretty 
 well. But one night Billy Reding's dog followed 
 me in and upstairs. Mr. Frary happened to be 
 passing through the hall and saw us. He imme- 
 diately let loose a torrent of profanity and abuse 
 and ended by ordering me out of the house. I 
 
58 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 was not able to get in a single word. But as soon 
 as he had disappeared Mrs. Frary came out of her 
 room and asked me not to go and not to mind it. 
 She then made the only derogatory remark that 
 I ever heard from her concerning him, 'If you 
 knew what I have to stand from him you would 
 think this nothing.' He had grown very sour and 
 irritable towards the latter part of his life. The 
 students, sensing this, made life miserable for 
 him, often shouting in a chorus as they passed his 
 windows, '0, Hod!' and other inane calls. I was 
 told that he had the veranda, originally built on 
 the Main Street front, removed because the boys 
 had the habit of stopping there as they passed and 
 dancing clogs for his benefit. 
 
 ''I have been told that Mr. Duncan once de- 
 fended Mr. Frary in a lawsuit and that the latter 
 in the fullness of his gratitude had impetuously 
 told him that he would board him for the rest of 
 his life. Be that as it may Mr. Duncan held on 
 for a long time and Mr. Frary got tired of the 
 arrangement, although it was clear that he ad- 
 mired his star boarder. During his last illness 
 he was delirious a part of the time. One day Mr. 
 Duncan went in to see him. Mrs. Frary bent 
 over the bed and said, 'Horace, this is Mr. Duncan 
 come to see you ; you know your friend, Mr. Dun- 
 can.' 'Know him? Damn him; I should say that 
 I do know him ! He hasn't paid a cent of board 
 for 20 years." 
 
 (It will be noticed that this is another form of 
 the legend already cited). 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 59 
 
 ''Mrs. Frary was a very superior woman. I 
 did not realize it so fully at the time as I have 
 since. I have known very few women of so much 
 character, so forceful, so intelligent and so good 
 at heart. How she dominated the dining-room! 
 It was clear even at Commencement time that she 
 acknowledged no superiors and very few equals. 
 She liked to talk with the men and seemed to have 
 little use for the 'weaker sex.' And the men 
 liked to talk with her, even the most distinguished 
 of them. Mr. Stoughton, the New York lawyer, 
 was one of her favorites. He had a home at 
 Windsor and sometimes drove to Hanover for 
 dinner. She would limp over to his chair, shake 
 hands with him and personally take his order. 
 Before he left the room she would draw up a 
 chair, sit down beside him, and they would have 
 the best of times. It would be the same way with 
 Dr. Peasley and many others. She liked to talk 
 to Mr. Duncan, but for the most part ignored Mrs. 
 Haddock, widow of Professor Haddock who was 
 once Minister to Portugal, who sat next to him. 
 
 "It was a real treat to hear Mr. Duncan talk. 
 Mrs. Haddock was an excellent foil for him. Mr. 
 Duncan would tell stories of his brother-in-law, 
 Rufus Choate, and Mrs. Haddock liked to tell of 
 her experiences at European courts. She had 
 been presented at several, either going to or re- 
 turning from their mission. In England she had 
 danced in a quadrille with Queen Victoria and 
 Prince Albert. At Lisbon she had given English 
 lessons to the young Prince. She had entertained 
 
60 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Daniel Webster and many other notables in her 
 own home. She had much to say about her 
 brother Richard B. Kimball. She loved to tell 
 about the courtship of her niece by Levi P. 
 Morton, and how when he first came to Hanover 
 in charge of a branch men's furnishing goods 
 store the faculty people would have nothing to do 
 with him socially. 'And see where he is now !' — 
 at that time millionaire banker and Minister to 
 France." 
 
 (Mrs. Haddock's conversation was often of the 
 nature of a monologue and frequently superposed 
 irrelevantly upon other talk. If one wished real 
 conversation with her it was necessary to sit close 
 and hurl winged words into a large ear trumpet.) 
 
 ''Mr. Duncan was emphatically the autocrat of 
 our table. He would raise his voice slightly, as 
 Mrs. Haddock was quite deaf, so I got much of 
 the conversation even before by gradual promo- 
 tion, seat by seat, I reached an eminent position 
 at Mr. Duncan's left hand and opposite Mrs. Had- 
 dock. He was the best conversationalist I ever 
 listened to. All his long life" (Mr. Duncan died 
 in 1883 in his 76th year.) "he had been a careful 
 student of books and of men, to the neglect per- 
 haps of his profession. His enunciation was slow 
 and musical, his language perfect, some might 
 think it almost stilted, never a suggestion of 
 slang, no 'young words' as Professor Parker used 
 to call them, and the matter was always interest- 
 ing. I have always felt that those table talks 
 with Mr. Duncan, running as they did through 
 

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62 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 several years, were a very important part of my 
 education." 
 
 Asa W. Waters of the class of 1871 permits me 
 to offer his evidence that in 1870 Squire Duncan 
 was not lacking in professional adroitness. This 
 is not inconsistent with the traditions of his later 
 years. 
 
 **Mr. Frary raved loudly and continuously, and 
 said 'cuss words' over the state liquor prohibitory 
 legislation, or threatened legislation, which he be- 
 lieved was an encroachment on personal liberty, 
 and unconstitutional, and he sought frequent 
 legal advice from Squire Duncan. Mr. Frary had 
 a small room for an office at the front entrance 
 to the dining-room, and when the wide door to the 
 latter was open we could hear conversations in 
 this little room whose door was always open and 
 Mr. Frary never lowered his voice, and I give a 
 conversation that I thus overheard, and which has 
 for some reason lodged in my memory ever since." 
 
 (Mr. FrsiYy) ''Squire Duncan, this being the 
 beginning of a new year (1870) I have made out 
 your bill for board for the past year; may I hand 
 it to you?" 
 
 (Squire Duncan) "Certainly, Mr. Frary; how 
 much is it?" 
 
 "Fifty-two weeks at four dollars per week I 
 calculate is $208; am I right?" 
 
 "Perfectly, Mr. Frary. Will you let me take 
 the bill, over to my office, for I think I have some 
 charges against you, Mr. Frary, for legal advice." 
 
 "All right. Squire Duncan." 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 63 
 
 Our curiosity was satisfied, for we overheard 
 the final settlement. ''I find, Mr. Frary, that I 
 have charges against you on my books, totaling 
 $260.25." 
 
 ''Why, Squire Duncan, I did not think I owed 
 you so much as that. What is the twenty-five 
 cents for?" 
 
 *'Do you not remember that I acknowledged a 
 deed for you ? I cannot help, Mr. Frary, but think 
 from your manner that you feel that I have 
 charged more than you expected, but there was 
 much legal effort and research necessary to give 
 sound legal opinions upon the constitutional ques- 
 tions you submitted to me; but I do not wish you 
 to think you are overcharged, and if you will re- 
 ceipt in full payment your bill against me, I will 
 do the same with mine against you." 
 
 ''All right, Squire Duncan." 
 
IV 
 
 THE OLD CHAPEL 
 
 When morning prayers took flight from the Old 
 Chapel in Old Dartmouth Hall to the new and 
 traditionless Rollins Chapel the College passed the 
 dividing line between two phases. One of the 
 many New Dartmouths began to displace an 
 antiquated and, in many respects, pernicious old 
 one. 
 
 The simple college of fifty years ago remains 
 in the memory of many of us in vivid contrast 
 with the huge complex organism of today. The 
 units themselves — educational, administrative, 
 financial, athletic, artistic, social — are subdivided 
 and of slow and unequal development. Compari- 
 son is valid; criticism is not fairly based on the 
 standards of today. 
 
 My reference is to effects on the material of 
 operation and production — the undergraduates 
 — without which the college would be futile ; and 
 especially to influences upon their disposition, 
 manners, and customs, because these make the 
 daily life of the college and largely determine the 
 later graduate relations of the same men. 
 
 In the evolutionary process colleges in similar 
 conditions have reached about the same stages, 
 but if we looked the country over we should find 
 much diversity in conditions and maturity of de- 
 velopment. 
 
 (64) 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 65 
 
 I suppose that every college has its period, long 
 or short, of mischief for mischief's sake. The 
 
 The Corpus Delicti 
 
 monkey stage is never completely outgrown, but 
 the mischief incidental to some scheme or excit- 
 ing occasion is quite different from that done 
 without the occasion. Lawless collection of ma- 
 5 
 
66 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 terials for a celebrating bonfire and heaping of 
 all the gates in the middle of the Green, over- 
 throwing someone's fence in a rush and painting 
 a dignified statue red, resisting stupid or brutal 
 police force and horning a professor, house-break- 
 ing for the sake of a trophy and changing the 
 sign boards on the highway differ very much in 
 the impulse that causes the one or the other. We 
 shall always have the misdeeds of excitement ; de- 
 liberate invention and perpetration of mischief 
 have nearly died out from the more advanced 
 colleges. 
 
 (The only serious instance we have Avith us at 
 present is ringing in a false fire alarm, a misde- 
 meanor so inconsiderate in trifling with a com- 
 munity's protection against great disaster that it 
 can be done only by those without training for 
 social life and of limited intelligence.) 
 
 In this respect a few years have made great 
 changes. And the chief causes of the changes 
 are obvious — the spirit of the times : no longer is 
 the perpetration of a malicious trick the object 
 of admiration within or without the college walls ; 
 the development of organized athletics : the husky 
 lad aching for adventure is no longer compelled 
 to steal the bell tongues or to steer a cow into a 
 recitation room in order to demonstrate his 
 prowess, in fact he is considered foolish and dis- 
 loyal if he wastes his power in such a manner; 
 different relations with the faculty: though no 
 more kindly at heart, they have come down to a 
 more companionable and comprehensible level; 
 
68 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 far better discipline, because less, and admin- 
 istered by experts, kindly, justly, reluctantly; and 
 too many other interesting things in the busy life 
 of the college. 
 
 As an important local factor, the Old Chapel, 
 with its accumulated barbarities, disappeared 
 from the daily life of the College in the autumn 
 of 1885, though its influence lingered until as late 
 as 1897, when senior rhetoricals were given up. 
 
 The room was shaped like a well-proportioned 
 packing case. The interior might be described as 
 wholly nave-ish. It was entered by two doors on 
 the west. The entering multitude passed on the 
 right and on the left of a raised platform sup- 
 porting a pulpit and seats for the faculty, and 
 when the hustle was over found itself seated 
 seniors and juniors in front, backed respectively 
 by sophomores and freshmen. Opposite the plat- 
 form, therefore at the east end of the room, was 
 a low gallery for organ and choir. Galleries also 
 ran along the sides, so high that their occupants, 
 the Chandlers and Aggies could, if they wished, 
 play cards or match pennies without observation. 
 The seats were long benches neatly grained and 
 incised by the jack-knives of many generations. 
 There was no more beauty or grace in the room 
 than in the bleachers now on the oval. It was 
 cold in winter, and at times so filled with smoke 
 that the chorus of exaggerated coughs often ob- 
 literated the gospel. The atmosphere, fragrant 
 with the prayers of good men, was also saturated 
 with the microbes of deviltry. At this time and 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 69 
 
 for many years after, the permanent members 
 of the faculty took turns in officiating when for 
 any reason the president was not there. This 
 custom was well appreciated by the objects of 
 prayer, and the attention to a novice's maiden ef- 
 fort was almost paralyzing. 
 
 As the chapel and the church were the only as- 
 sembly rooms in the village (though on a grand 
 enough occasion seats were placed in the gym- 
 nasium) the proper, or at least the lawful, doings 
 here would have fitted out a good variety show: 
 brilliant lectures, as of Dr. John Lord — how well 
 I recall the high nasal, '*0 ! transcendental Car- 
 lyle!" and the clog dance which he apparently 
 carried on back of the pulpit as his periods grew 
 more and more dynamic — and senior rhetoricals ; 
 singing school and Daniel Pratt; college mass- 
 meetings and projections with the calcium light. 
 
 The Chapel music was in charge of an organist 
 and a chorister from the nearly defunct Handel 
 Society. (Possibly some who read this may be 
 induced to turn to Professor J. K. Lord's History 
 and read there of this ancient and most honorable 
 organization. It is a genuine loss to the College 
 that one of the most notable and successful 
 musical organizations in New England should 
 have been allowed to lapse and should have been 
 replaced later by the glee club only, with its jolly 
 but trivial music. In the present awakening of 
 the colleges to higher musical ambitions it might 
 be possible to restore the name and purpose of 
 the Handel Society, though it would hardly be 
 
The Region of Harmonious Strains 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 71 
 
 possible to recover its early prestige.) At this 
 time the society elected three or four members 
 from each class, held occasional meetings, and 
 was listed in the Aegis, but its only publicity 
 was in the chapel service maintained by the 
 meagerly salaried chorister and organist. This 
 relation to colleg'e affairs continued for many 
 years with less and less discrimination in elec- 
 tions. The last stage was the election of a group 
 of good fellows who could stand a 25-cents initia- 
 tion fee, and a choral march to *'Lige" Carter's 
 where the 25 cents each was expended in peanuts 
 and accessories. Along in the eighties the faculty 
 appointed Professor Charles F. Richardson and 
 the writer a committee to strive for its reanima- 
 tion. But there was no life in it. Ancient repu- 
 tation could make no stand against modern condi- 
 tions. The difficulty about discarding good old 
 things is to know which are finished forever and 
 which will be required again. 
 
 My memory is a little hazy, but I think that in 
 our freshman fall ('68) the organ was a malodeon 
 with the heaves, and a ''used" organ was installed 
 during the year. This organ was a mark for all 
 the kinds of pranks that could be performed with 
 or upon an organ, the most effective being to 
 wedge open a high squealy pipe so that, when the 
 air was turned in, a continuous and pervasive 
 wail came forth until the air was gone. It was 
 indeed ''an ungodly kist of whistles." Organists 
 of cunning learned to give the organ a cautious 
 trial in advance, and many mornings the choir 
 
72 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 sang without any organ because it had been mis- 
 guided into freakish ways. The chorister had his 
 trials too ; he was paid to have a choir there, but 
 no choir was paid to be there. At least one faith- 
 ful chorister, deserted by his choir, carried 
 through the whole hymn alone, much to his credit 
 and to the joy of the audience. It was always a 
 demonstrative audience and surprisingly sensitive 
 to any little misadventure in the music. 
 
 We, the commoners, as contrasted with the 
 dwindling aristocracy of the Handel Society, had 
 no hymn books in those days, and our only help- 
 ful contribution to the service was a sort of hum- 
 ming obligato when the tune was familiar. It 
 may be that earlier the Compleat Psalmist 
 brought up from the Indian school at Lebanon, 
 Connecticut, or Watts and Select was in the 
 students' hands. History does not tell. It might 
 have occurred to some one that the animals' at- 
 tention could have been engaged a least tempo- 
 rarily by letting them roar. The little Aegis is 
 moved to put forth an editorial on the subject, in 
 the spring of 1871, which concludes, ''We ask not 
 now a modern chapel; we ask not voluntary at- 
 tendance; we ask not to have it warmed in 
 winter; we ask not even easy seats; we do ask 
 hymn-books. Give, give us hymn-books." 
 
 Among the pleasant customs of the place was 
 that of noticing, ''featuring," celebrities, that is 
 to say college notorieties. The students faced the 
 doors of entrance and as men came in who by 
 reason of some action (not meritorious) were in 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 73 
 
 the public eye, although they might be unaware 
 of it, they were greeted by well-graduated ''wood- 
 ing up," sometimes gentle and significant, some- 
 times tempestuous and dust-raising, always un- 
 desired. One morning during the suspense period 
 of a faculty investigation involving a considerable 
 number of men, the hymn accidentally selected for 
 the day had for a refrain ''Lord, here am I, send 
 me; send me," which was received with joyful ap- 
 preciation. 
 
 Here Daniel Pratt, the Great American 
 Traveler, delivered those famous lectures of 
 which I remember only the titles, "The Inventive, 
 Invisible Propelling Power of all Valuables," and 
 "The Vocabulary Laboratory." Daniel was that 
 for which the people have invented so many 
 synonymous terms, — he was cracked, nutty, 
 bughouse; he had a partial vacuum under his hat; 
 or in really elegant language, he was troubled 
 with flitter-mice in the campanile. I do not know 
 whether any one ever had the curiosity to trace 
 him to a relation with the rest of the world. He 
 appeared; he lectured; he gathered the cash; he 
 made off. And that is all we knew of him. He 
 was a primitive form of the modern smoke- 
 talker. Under guard and escort of a self-chosen 
 committee he was brought to the chapel stage 
 where he was received with thunderous applause. 
 After a serio-grotesque introduction he started 
 on his "lecture" which was a swirl of incoherent 
 verbiage. It soon wearied an audience little 
 inured at that time to lectures, and the senior 
 
74 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 president would interrupt with the suggestion 
 that it would be wise to take up the collection be- 
 fore the audience began to fade away. After the 
 
 The Great American Traveler 
 
 collection Daniel was nominated President of the 
 United States with applause comparable only to 
 that of a national convention. Then it was 
 whispered that the faculty were on the way and 
 that he would better beat it. Beat it he did, some- 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 75 
 
 times with the speed of a jack rabbit, followed by 
 a hooting, howling mob. The last time that I 
 knew of his presence he made the statement be- 
 fore he left that ''the bottom of hell had fallen 
 out and hell had lit in Hanover," which certainly 
 was not incoherent. But the boys were not so 
 bad. He got a pretty good purse; and on one of 
 the more agitating occasions, when Daniel 
 dropped the collection which had been bagged in 
 a handkerchief, the mob fell to and gathered and 
 returned it all. 
 
 By ancient custom, still continued, the senior 
 class closed their work in the College with the 
 **Sing Out" — "Come let us anew Our journey 
 pursue," to the tune of Amesbury. It was as 
 difficult to carry through without some slip then 
 as it is now; but the occasion was a solemn one, 
 rotwithstanding; it meant so much to men who 
 were emerging from the sheltered and directed 
 life to the struggle in an unknown world. 
 Knowledge of the time when this custom orig- 
 inated seems now to be lost. My father, who 
 entered college in 1832, said that it was consid- 
 ered an old custom in his day. 
 
 On Wednesday afternoon, seniors — one to 
 four, as many as could be dragged to the sacrifice 
 — spoke original pieces to the assembled college. 
 It was an exercise in favor with no one, and the 
 assembled multitude was like a pack of wolves, 
 watching for any weakness in order to pounce 
 and devour. Woe to the senior who had made 
 himself disliked ! Woe to the platitudinous bore ! 
 
76 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Woe to the halting f orgetter of lines ! As a typi- 
 cal ordeal for public speakers it was most com- 
 mendable, and if generally applied would have 
 saved the world eons of dreary deliverances. The 
 man who had something to say and said it quickly 
 and audibly could have a hearing, and who else 
 deserves one? In fact, any one who could hold 
 that crowd for twelve minutes could preach a 
 sermon in a boiler factory to an intoxicated gang 
 of cannibals who knew no English. Although it 
 lacked decorum as a college exercise, it dragged 
 on long after the chapel was abandoned for re- 
 ligious uses, but was finally discontinued as too 
 demoralizing to the College and too exhausting to 
 the presiding officer. 
 
 The chapel was a convenient exchange for the 
 products of the ''Darkmouth" Press — class re- 
 criminations, grinds, protests against some ut- 
 terance of the Dartmouth, or the Aegis, or some 
 faculty action — and casual leaflets were often to 
 be found scattered over the seats. It was, of 
 course, the duty of the janitor to intercept or to 
 collect all such literature, but he was only one and 
 not a college graduate at that, and the name of 
 his adversaries was Legion. After I had been 
 on the faculty a year or two a variation of this 
 custom aroused my interest and my curiosity, 
 which had to wait some thirty years for satisfac- 
 tion. When the College was all assembled, the 
 bell had ceased ringing, and the President had 
 risen to conduct the service, suddenly a hugh sheet 
 of paper loosened itself from the wall back of the 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 77 
 
 faculty, gently opened and unrolled displaying a 
 bitter attack upon one of the classes present by 
 another. For a period great noise prevailed, but 
 after it ceased the service went on. It was espe- 
 cially trying for the President, as he was com- 
 pelled to go through the service without any 
 knowledge of the attraction behind him. The in- 
 genious inventor told me all about it many years 
 after he had secured an irrevocable diploma. 
 
 From time to time other objects were dis- 
 covered in the chapel which were not in harmony 
 with devotional serenity, — a skeleton from the 
 Medical School, a real donkey, an anticipatory 
 cradle. 
 
 Among the methods employed by consecutive 
 classes to show distaste for one another was that 
 known as "greasing the seats," — smearing the 
 benches with some viscid non-volatile substance 
 which disqualified them for their proper use ; mo- 
 lasses or soft soap would answer the purpose very 
 well though rather too easily removable with 
 water. I do not know that any one was ever be- 
 guiled into sitting down in the mess, and it is 
 difficult to understand now why this form of af- 
 front was taken so seriously, since it gave the 
 victims freedom from chapel until the seats were 
 purified. The typical case, of course, was treat- 
 ment of the freshman seats, but one morning the 
 Juniors — my own class — were thus evicted 
 from their devotions. Outrage unspeakable! An 
 idiot with initiative always has followers. He — 
 that unknown idiot — yelled, "Over into the 
 
78 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Sophomore seats," and the whole class trailed 
 after him like so many particularly foolish sheep. 
 What could be more absurd? Why should Juniors 
 
 The Wily Faculty Man 
 
 ever wish to revert to the haunts of Sophomores ; 
 and especially when they could go out and sit on 
 the grass and lose one chapel? This business 
 called for blood, and men were already coming to 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 79 
 
 grips for a row which would have been memorable 
 in the history of the College when suddenly a 
 presence appeared among them. It happened that 
 chapel that morning was in charge of a lovable 
 gentleman with a keen eye and unquestioned re- 
 serve force. ''Stop/' he thundered; and they 
 stopped. *'Go out," he ordered the invaders; and 
 they went — past the ranks of seniors who stood 
 on their seats and jeered. I do not know whether 
 any other member of the faculty could have 
 brought off this harmless conclusion, but 
 ''Charley" Young, later known to Princeton 
 students as "Twinkle" did, and of course we liked 
 him all the better. 
 
 On occasions frequent enough to establish a 
 custom the Seniors and Juniors, entitled to prec- 
 edence, remained in their seats at the close of the 
 brief services, while the lower classes rushed past 
 them. The whisper had gone around that a cane 
 in Freshman hands challenged the Sophomores to 
 die for the right just outside the front doors. But 
 it had been tried before and usually the Voice of 
 Authority walked off with the cane. Only the in- 
 judicious really grieved; for there were great in- 
 conveniences in unprepared clothes and unsecured 
 text books. 
 
 One more custom which I will mention was 
 firmly fastened on the Old Chapel, the college 
 mass-meetings. I have always supposed that they 
 were unauthorized. In any case when business 
 was to be transacted in convention of the whole 
 college, the president of the senior class called a 
 
80 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 mass-meeting commonly by notices passed around 
 during the services, and, as much as possible, men 
 were prevented from going out at their con- 
 clusion. All classes had recitations immediately 
 after chapel, and the meetings used up a large 
 part and frequently the whole of the recitation 
 hour. I can imagine the annoyance to the mem- 
 bers of the faculty as they sat waiting for their 
 classes to appear. From the student standpoint 
 this was regarded as an ancient right. It lasted 
 many years after this time, but before the chapel 
 was abandoned I think permission to hold such 
 a meeting was required, and granted only for 
 substantial reasons. 
 
 It would be an exaggeration to claim that the 
 matters here mentioned were of daily occurrence, 
 but I think it is a moderate statement that at this 
 period no student could go through college with- 
 out an experience of them all. And they meant 
 much more in the life of the college than the bare 
 incident. 
 
 When in the fall of 1885 the regular chapel 
 services were transferred to the new chapel, the 
 well-planned gift of Edward Ashton Rollins of 
 the class of 1851, a huge load of hindering cus- 
 toms and precedents was taken out of the way 
 automatically, without discussion or question, and 
 the forward movement of the College quickened 
 and lightened. 
 
W ^' 
 
 o 
 
 0. 
 
 ^•^-tfx^r 
 
V 
 
 THE BURYING GROUND 
 
 **I yesterday passed a whole afternoon in the 
 church yard, the cloisters and the church, amus- 
 ing myself with the tombstones and inscriptions 
 that I met with in these several regions of the 
 dead. Most of them recorded nothing else of the 
 buried person but that he was born upon one day 
 and died upon another; the whole history of his 
 life being comprehended in these two circum- 
 stances that are common to all mankind." 
 
 Should any one, surprised, inquire by what 
 chance one whose life has been submerged in 
 dangerous ''practical" studies knows of Joseph 
 Addison's meditations upon Westminster Abbey, 
 the answer is ready — a lonesome country college 
 a half century ago, the absence of those seductive 
 electives in Economics, or Biology, or Music, or 
 Art which lure students from their well-earned 
 sports, a ponderous personality who roared good 
 literature at us with the inward gentleness of the 
 sucking dove, and a noble liberality of the United 
 Fraternity and the Social Friends in the circula- 
 tion of their books. 
 
 It is to be held in memory that the settlement of 
 the town began five years earlier than the estab- 
 lishment of the College, and homesteads were 
 taken in a broken line around from the north- 
 west corner to the Center, that the oldest place of 
 
 (82) 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 83 
 
 burial was at the Center; and that the early 
 population was surprisingly large. In ''Hanover 
 Forty Years Ago," Dorrance Currier tells us, 
 doubtless from the records, that the population of 
 the town of Hanover in 1800 was 28 more than 
 in 1900. In 1771 Eleazar Wheelock set aside an 
 acre, and this grant was later confirmed by the 
 Trustees as ''a burying ground for the use of this 
 College and the inhabitants of this vicinity." 
 
 Our predecessors in the town and college left 
 a record here as nowhere else. It is fragmentary, 
 and must be read with sympathy, imagination, 
 and the historic sense. There is no mental task 
 more unnatural and difficult than to read the past 
 in the light of its own standards and customs. In 
 our pride in all the machinery and in the mind's 
 broad scope of the present we fail to realize that 
 the intelligence which we scatter over many af- 
 fairs they were compelled to concentrate on a few. 
 We forget that the intervening past and future 
 — our past and their future — had not then ar- 
 rived, that they had precedents which we do not 
 recognize; and we fail to see that they were as 
 modern and progressive in their day as are the 
 best of us now. We may smile at their ways of 
 life and their modes of expression because they 
 are unfamiliar, but for the same times and con- 
 ditions we can claim no assured superiority. Even 
 our sense of humor, so different from theirs, ends 
 in complete irreverence. 
 
 The settlers of the valley of the Connecticut 
 were a staunch and sturdv band. Following 
 
84 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 closely as they did on the receding Indians they 
 met recurrent waves of savagery with indomit- 
 able courage. Their quality as pioneers in a new 
 territory was never surpassed unless by the May- 
 flower's company. They were seeking homes, not 
 gold nor adventure ; and — sure sign of worth — 
 they brought along their wives and children. In 
 Hanover in 1767, in a population of 92 there were 
 26 heads of families and 11 unmarried men. As 
 a matter of course they brought along the church 
 and the town-meeting. For Hanover the town 
 government was set up before they took posses- 
 sion. They were progressives looking for larger 
 liberty in the minor details of life than they had 
 at home. Wheelock's safe conduct to Dr. Crane 
 for Sunday travel, when he sent him in a hurry 
 to Connecticut to delay Mrs. Wheelock and the 
 Indian School, is evidence, and, in a more piquant 
 way, the exclamations of the early Canaan settler, 
 "I don't want to stay any longer in a place where 
 I'm not allowed to kiss my wife on Sunday," and 
 — worse yet — ''We'll build a home up there 
 where 'taint unlawful for a man to say 'damn it' 
 if he is strongly tempted." 
 
 If they were at times contumacious and 
 obstinate it was with legal and not physical 
 methods. They had no telephones nor daily 
 papers nor moving pictures to occupy their at- 
 tention. It is possible to argue that they were of 
 splendidly rugged bodies or they could not have 
 endured the conditions of life as long as they did, 
 or that they died untimely deaths from hardships 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 85 
 
 and lack of care. The headstones tell too many 
 tales of death by consumption, and of ''infant 
 sons," young wives, and men under fifty. 
 
 Wheelock's acre now augmented on the north, 
 is entered through Sanborn Lane between Robin- 
 son and Tuck Halls; and in all New England 
 there can be no similar parcel of ground divided 
 
 The Old Valley from the Northeast 
 
 by a narrower boundary from perpetual youth 
 and boundless vitality. From every human hope 
 and eager forelook a step carries to the calm and 
 completeness of the past. Without is work to be 
 done, responsibility without limit to be taken on, 
 the highest service to be performed ; within is the 
 story or the hint of work well done, burdens 
 borne, service finished. Only once can one ex- 
 perience in full the new comer's pleasant shock of 
 surprise as he comes from the paraphernalia of 
 
86 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 life, ugly but some think convenient — dusty 
 streets, black sidewalks, poles where trees should 
 be, ill-smelling engines, and the rest — to a spot 
 made so beautiful by nature, the two promon- 
 tories, the three ravines carved out by the water 
 rushing to the sea, the ancient pines, the wild 
 flowers in their season, and the whole carefully 
 tended, but not marred, by perpetual care. 
 
 It is a place of historic inspiration and of af- 
 fectionate memories. Of the eight deceased presi- 
 dents of the College six are buried here. Dana 
 and Tyler removed after their terms of office, and 
 their graves are elsewhere. The bodies of about 
 forty members of the faculty were placed here 
 and those of many friendly villagers. After four 
 years the students scatter to the ends of the earth, 
 and if all of the living thousands did not love all 
 their teachers equally, it must be that many af- 
 fectionate thoughts go back to Sanborn and Noyes 
 and Proctor and Patterson and Young and Frost 
 and William Smith and Richardson and Wells and 
 Updyke, and indeed to all the rest, from men who 
 remember them yet. Families have grown up 
 here in happy homes, and from the need of larger 
 opportunities have gone over the land and across 
 the seas, but they never forget, and in due season 
 return to bear to this beautiful place of rest those 
 who made the homes. How far reaching this re- 
 lation is may be imagined, since of the fourteen 
 members of the academic faculty of my time I, the 
 writer, know descendants, in the first or second 
 generation, of ten, and I am not aware that the 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 87 
 
 others left issue; and a similar statement could 
 be made for the scientific and medical faculties. 
 
 The roll of burials numbers about 1200 for the 
 150 years ; but this is certainly less than the actual 
 number. The record was made up in 1912 from 
 the tombstones; some inscriptions were obliter- 
 ated; there were nameless graves; and a few 
 names since have failed to be added to the list. 
 
 The center of greatest interest is a rod or two 
 west of the eastern boundary of the older acre, 
 for here the forefathers of the hamlet sleep. The 
 honor of coming first belongs to the Rev. John 
 Maltby, who died September 30, 1771. He was 
 the son of Mrs. Sarah Maltby who became 
 Wheelock's second wife, and was held by 
 Wheelock in fatherly affection. Had he lived he 
 might have been the second president of the Col- 
 lege. The inscription follows: 
 
 Here refts y'^ Body of y^ Rev'd 
 Mr. John Maltby born at 
 New Haven in Connectic 
 Auguft: y^ 3^ A D 1727, 
 Graduated at Yale 
 College AD 1747 
 Minifter to a Presbyterean 
 Church at Bermuda & 
 Then at wilton in South Car- 
 olina. A strenuous afsertor of y^ 
 Doctrines of Grace Convinced 
 of Original Guilt & Confid- 
 ing in y^ Sole Righteousnefs of 
 Christ. Juftife, Loft Man, 
 
88 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 before God, In Preaching, 
 Zealous & Pathetic, in his 
 Devotions fervent, his Serm- 
 ons Judicious Correct & Inftr- 
 uctive: his ftile Manly & 
 Solemn, of Manners gentle 
 Polite & humone of strong 
 Mentel Endowments, embe 
 llifh'd with Sacred & Polite 
 Literoture. In his Friendship 
 Cordial sincere & truly 
 Detefting Craft Difsimulatino 
 & Fraud, he died Sept'" 30"^ 
 (A.D. 1771) AEtat 45^° 
 
 From the apparent accuracy of detail we may 
 guess that it was drafted by Pres. Wheelock, but 
 the archaic form and blundering workmanship 
 may be ascribed to a local artist whose improving 
 hand is recognizable in others of the early head- 
 stones. This, a horizontal slab, is dark and rusty, 
 poorly weathered; a little of the inscription has 
 broken away, and more will yield to a slight pres- 
 sure. The early stones are plain slabs, quarried 
 in east Lebanon for the first thirty years or so, 
 of a poor quality of iron-bearing slate or schist, 
 stratified, and easily breaking up along the plains 
 of cleavage. They are commonly finished only on 
 one side and with a trefoil outline at the upper 
 edge. Similar stones are found in neighboring 
 burying grounds of about the same period. Many 
 of the inscriptions upon these stones in the grave- 
 yard at Hanover Center are wholly lost. Fol- 
 
90 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 lowing the slate period, stones of a quality of 
 soapstone, quarried in Vermont, were used for a 
 time. Marble of a coarse variety, likewise from 
 Vermont, comes into common use after 1800, 
 and the inscriptions in some cases are very well- 
 made and clear. Beyond the distinguished tombs 
 of President Wheelock and his companions the 
 simple slabs for headstones were held to be 
 enough in the early days. Monuments are of 
 much later date. Nearly all the later stones are 
 of granite of many varieties and sources, some 
 of them very beautiful in their polish. As one 
 views the ponderous parallelopipedon resting over 
 the remains of Asa Crosby one does not wonder 
 at the frank belief of Jason Dudley that he would 
 be a little late to the resurrection. And others 
 whose escatology involves the literal uprising of 
 the material body have reason for a like anxiety. 
 Next to Maltby's tomb are those of Eleazar 
 Wheelock and his wife, and nearby those of John 
 Wheelock and Bezaleel Woodward. All are of a 
 similar general style to Maltby's with horizontal 
 slabs, but of later date, and much better finish. 
 Wheelock's is often quoted, but may not for that 
 reason be omitted — in Latin and English 
 
 Here rests the body 
 
 of 
 
 Eleazar Wheelock, S. T. D. 
 
 Founder, and first president 
 
 of 
 
 Dartmouth College, 
 
 and 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 91 
 
 Moor's Charity School 
 By the gospel he subdued the ferocity of the 
 savages and to the civilized he opened new paths 
 
 of science. 
 
 Traveler, 
 
 Go, if you can, and deserve 
 
 The sublime reward of such merit. 
 
 He was born in the year 1710, and died 
 
 in 1779. 
 
 Pietate filii Johannis Wheelock, 
 Hoc monumentum constitutum, inscrip- 
 tumque fuit. 
 
 Anno MDCCCX 
 
 And no living person would belittle the virtues 
 of Mary Wheelock, wife of Bezaleel Woodward 
 after reading, 
 
 Her remembrance will last when 
 this marble is defaced and the 
 latest reader of this inscription is 
 numbered with the dead 
 
 The study of mortuary inscriptions and gifts 
 to the dead has always interested the living. 
 From these stones it is plain that at the end of 
 the 18th century it was held to be essential to have 
 reading matter upon the gravestones besides the 
 mere vital statistics, a custom which has con- 
 tinued with gradual decrease as monuments and 
 headstones have taken the place of the simple 
 slab. The elaborate detail of the Egyptian tombs 
 is necessarily absent, and the terse, often sym- 
 
92 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 bolic, label of the shelf in the catacombs "In 
 pace", ''locus Petri", ''dormit", or the palm 
 branch, was not enough. The legends on these 
 stones are pious if the deceased is the speaker, 
 laudatory if the testimony of another, and very 
 rarely expressions of grief. The headstone at the 
 grave of young Mrs. Tilden is an example of 
 several of the characteristics of these early Han- 
 over inscriptions, 
 
 In memory of Mr.*^ Achfah wife of Mr 
 
 Joseph Tilden who died Dec 30^^ 
 
 1776 in her 28"^ Year 
 
 Remember Frinds as you 
 
 Pafs by as you be now fo 
 
 once was I as I be now so 
 
 muft you be. Prepare For 
 
 death & Follow me 
 ''Student's Row" discloses an amiable fraternal 
 custom of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 
 the setting of memorial stones by organizations of 
 the College. Three were placed by the United 
 Fraternity, three by the Social Friends, and two 
 by the Theological Society. The earliest dated 
 stone is to John Merrill, a freshman who died in 
 1797, and the list closed, perhaps for lack of ma- 
 terial, with memorials to two freshmen in 1831 
 erected, one by the Theological Society and one 
 by the Social Friends. It is quite a tax upon the 
 imagination to reproduce a freshman worthy of 
 a monument by any Theological Society. 
 
 This one has no date but is probably prior to 
 1800. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 93 
 
 Here lie y^ remains of Mr. Levi 
 Washbourn of New Braintree Late a 
 Member of y^ School in 
 this Place who died by a short 
 and Violent Disease aged 18 
 Years & 5 months. Here Youth 
 and beauty lose their grace 
 In this reclase and gloomy 
 Place Till y*' angelic trum- 
 pet sound to wake this 
 saint from under Ground 
 
 Our young brothers of a century ago were not 
 indifferent to the claims of fashion, and the 
 fraternal slabs much resemble one another. The 
 prevailing mode seems to have been, first a motto 
 or text in Latin, then the statement of facts, or 
 theme, followed by four to six original verses, 
 which might be styled improvement of the theme. 
 
 This to Junior Spaulding is a perfect type : 
 
 Omnium aetatum certum est terminus. 
 
 Consecrated 
 
 by the 
 
 United Fraternity 
 
 to the memory of 
 
 Oliver Spaulding 
 
 drowned 
 
 in the Connecticut River 
 
 A. D. 1807, July 29^^ 
 
 With social affection and virtuous mind 
 Exalted by genius, by science refined. 
 
94 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Our Spaulding in rare combination did blend 
 The man, the philosopher, poet and friend. 
 
 And these are the verses inscribed upon the 
 gravestone of Senior Simonds whose death took 
 place in 1801 : 
 
 „k. *s.-^ ?- 
 
 The Forefathers of the Hamlet Sleep 
 
 Science, Religion in our Simonds shone 
 And all the manly virtues were his own 
 With anguished hearts we mourn his early doom 
 And pay affection's tribute at his tomb. 
 
 Unfortunately the verses in other cases are 
 nearly or quite illegible, but it is obvious that il- 
 literacy in these inscriptions was not at this 
 period inevitable, though it might have been held 
 excusable. 
 
 Artemas Cook, a sophomore, died August, 1800, 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 95 
 
 and his gravestone renewed in 1859 by a surviv- 
 ing college mate bears the following legend: 
 Sons of Dartmouth ! Your brother had 
 quickness of apprehansion 
 and aptness to teach, 
 with the wages of teaching 
 he bought instruction 
 Of the many noble women buried here the 
 names of four have become peculiarly wrought 
 into the history of Hanover — Mary Maynard 
 Hitchcock in whose memory the Hospital was 
 established, Emily Howe Hitchcock who founded 
 and endowed the Howe Library, Theodosia Stock- 
 bridge, whose name is given to the Stockbridge 
 Association for Boys, and of whom one of her 
 former boys declared, "No woman in our village 
 ever exerted a like influence for good," and 
 Christie Warden, an estimable young woman, 
 whose name is associated with one of the most 
 dramatic tragedies in New England. 
 
 The curiosity aroused by reading from a simple 
 slab: 
 
 Here lies the mortal wreck of 
 
 Sally Duget 
 
 In the midst of society 
 
 she lived alone 
 
 beneath the mockery of cheerfulness 
 
 she had deep woes 
 
 in the ruins of her intellect 
 
 the kindness of her hart survived 
 
 She perished in the snow 
 
 in the night of Feb. 26, 1854 
 
96 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 is satisfied in a letter to The Dartmouth Adver- 
 tiser and Literary Gazette, dated March 1, 1854, 
 and published in the April number. The letter is 
 signed, J. R., without doubt the Rev. John Rich- 
 ards, then minister of the College Church. Sally 
 Duget's mother, born Hannah Rogers, was pro- 
 cured from Connecticut by Eleazar Wheelock to 
 superintend Commons Hall. Sally, bright and 
 
 A View in the Modem Section 
 
 well educated for the time, at the age of twenty- 
 five met with a misfortune which unsettled her 
 reason. For the last thirty years she lived the 
 life of a hermit in a hut on Corey Hill. The 
 epitaph placed on the stone was suggested by J. 
 R. in his letter. 
 
 Of course here, as in all similar places since 
 men put away their dead, the imagination finds 
 ample scope for human interest. It is believed 
 that evidence is here of hard conditions and lack 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 97 
 
 of sanitary knowledge. I do not know that we 
 can tell from these records alone. Twenty per 
 cent of the inscriptions — about 240 — are for 
 children under 12; but the records of the last 
 decade of the Town of Hanover show the same 
 proportion. More careful scrutiny shows that in 
 the careful later records almost exactly half are 
 of nonviable, still-born, children, of which there 
 is little evidence on the stones. Nearly twice as 
 many children who drew breath are buried here, 
 proportionately. From 1798 to 1813 inclusive are 
 8 recorded burials, not more than one in any year ; 
 in 1814 there are 4 and in 1815-16, and in the 
 next two years one each. These and similar 
 groupings suggest, but do not prove, some childish 
 epidemic. There is one family group of 17, and 
 of the 17, 14 were 24 or younger. Stones mark 
 the graves of three children of Rev. John Smith, 
 Professor of Languages, a daughter of 23, two 
 sons of 28 and 18, all victims of consumption. 
 We cannot charge these good people with neglect, 
 but they may have had too much faith in ''the 
 mysterious dispensations of Providence.'' 
 
 There are evidences too of tough and enduring 
 fiber. Eight members of the Flint family are 
 grouped together whose average age was 60 
 years ; and the seven occupants of the Bridgman 
 lot reached a total of about 500 years. 
 
 The section of the cemetery entered by the lane 
 which passes the Chandler Building, the Hubbard 
 House, and an unsightly ravine-head west of 
 
 7 
 
98 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 North Massachusetts is in its use about a century 
 later than Wheelock's acre. To the antiquary it 
 is much less interesting, but it is the resting place 
 for the bodies of many who are still held in loving 
 memory by the living. It was at one time con- 
 nected with the older section by a footbridge 
 which spanned the deep ravine and terminated 
 near the little fountain. The bridge became un- 
 safe and was removed, and funds for its restora- 
 tion, unfortunately, have never been available. 
 At the time of writing, exact records of the an- 
 nexation of the later addition and of the building 
 and demolition of the bridge have not been found. 
 The addition was brought into use about 1876, 
 and the bridge was built in 1882, according to the 
 best information attainable. 
 
VI 
 
 COLLEGE DISCIPLINE 
 
 Writing upon college discipline by one who 
 knows is doubtless an indiscretion. I have often 
 longed to be indiscreet, but now that the op- 
 portunity is present I am like the comic man who 
 did not dare to be as funny as he could. Two 
 fruitful topics are barred anyway — matters 
 which in the long stretch of years I have forgot- 
 ten, intentionally or otherwise, and matters which 
 would uncomfortably indentify active partici- 
 pants. Generalities are far less piquant than 
 concrete stories of the misdeeds of John Doe and 
 the rest. But John who cribbed in examination 
 is now an honored and honorable member of so- 
 ciety, and Richard Roe, his partner, who screwed 
 up the door of the recitation room with the pro- 
 fessor inside, has modified his idea of a joke and 
 is now a joy to all who know him, while James 
 Hoe, who really disgraced himself and was al- 
 lowed softly and silently to vanish away, is a 
 deacon in the church and a large contributor to 
 the Alumni Fund. No, it would not do. 
 
 The stories of turbulence, insubordination, and 
 personal annoyance by students in the first half 
 of the 19th century seem incredible to the college 
 officer of today. (And the same may be said of 
 some of the regulations of the Trustees and 
 Faculty.) But one may read of them in Professor 
 
 (99) 
 
100 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Lord's citations from the college records and 
 other sources. And these citations are matched 
 from the experience of other institutions during 
 the same and even a later period. Strachey, writ- 
 ing of Eton at the time when Arnold became 
 Head Master of Rugby, 1828, says its government 
 was a '^system of anarchy tempered by despot- 
 ism." ''But there were times when even that in- 
 domitable will (Keate's) was overwhelmed by the 
 flood of lawlessness. Every Sunday afternoon he 
 attempted to read sermons to the whole school 
 assembled ; and every Sunday afternoon the whole 
 school assembled shouted him down." 
 
 Whatever the customs elsewhere, here, remov- 
 ing an offending stove from a recitation room and 
 throwing it into the river ; firing a gun so heavily 
 loaded as to break 320 panes of glass, in retalia- 
 tion for offensive discipline; turning the occu- 
 pants out of a dilapidated building and razing it 
 to the ground ; tarring and feathering a bad man ; 
 blowing a horn in recitation; wrecking a book- 
 store go beyond the commonplace in college 
 pranks, especially when superposed upon all the 
 familiar disorders. 
 
 Some of this was matched by gum-shoe de- 
 tective expeditions of the faculty even in disguise, 
 and by police methods doubtless as vexatious to 
 the professors as provocative to the students. 
 
 From 1868 (when I first had personal knowl- 
 edge) there was a diminuendo in all these prac- 
 tices, not without occasional crescendo bursts. 
 And the diminuendo has continued. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 101 
 
 If you ask me why the change, I reply at once, 
 ''Because students of the present time do not care 
 to bother with these forms of entertainment." 
 No amount of policing could hold 2000 students 
 in check during all the hours of the twenty-four. 
 The searcher for ultimate truth returns with an- 
 other ''Why?" "Why do they not care?" Here 
 various philosophers will differ. My own answer 
 is that the greatest factor in bringing about this 
 most welcome change in college manners is the 
 development of athletic sports within and without 
 the walls. It has been a steady influence for self- 
 government upon the students, and an influence 
 upon the faculty for sympathy with the students' 
 interests outside of the curriculum. And these 
 influences have reacted upon both groups. No 
 student can horn or otherwise abuse a professor 
 after finding him to be a good sport in a hard- 
 fought game of tennis, or a good cook in one of 
 the cabins of the Outing Club. No instructor 
 after acting as referee in field sports, or after 
 talking over affairs of college interest with a 
 group of undergraduates on the way home from 
 a football game can pussy-foot around to see 
 whether his agreeable young acquaintances are 
 playing cards when they ought to be studying. 
 
 There are, of course, other causes contributing 
 to these more tranquil days and nights, to be 
 emphasized according to the personal equation of 
 the emphasizer. Such are, the trend of the times 
 and public opinion, more refined surroundings, 
 the critical attention of the newspapers, a feeling 
 
102 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 of nearness and neighborliness instead of isola- 
 tion, a wider area of patronage introducing di- 
 verse habits of thought, the complex organization 
 of the modern college, the elective system, and the 
 belief that the teacher really has something to 
 give. Upon these as a basis floats, as it were, the 
 beautiful flower of self-government. The election 
 of studies has brought relief to many a teacher 
 compelled to carry along men who had no taste 
 for his work, but who really were interested in 
 something else which they were unable to get. 
 More frequently than is generally known, some 
 Ph. D. freshly decorated from the graduate school, 
 with vast learning, and with vast contempt for 
 the teachers who have not had his advantages and 
 for the "boneheads" to whom he has to devote 
 his time, or some professor called from another 
 institution, with individuality and superficial 
 mannerisms, will arouse the hostility of the 
 quickly and crudely judging undergraduate as 
 suddenly as one dog hates a stranger dog upon 
 the street. Electives save him from serious 
 trouble until his good qualities develop or become 
 known. No longer can the hostility of a whole 
 class swell around an instructor till it bursts into 
 storm. The courses are elective, and the humor- 
 ous undergraduate who did not take the odious 
 course remarks to his grumbling chum who did, 
 ''Well, it serves you right for electing him when 
 you could have taken Tommy," (Tommy being the 
 ''most popular" professor of the year). 
 
 Horning, an unpleasant custom seldom war- 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 10 
 
 o 
 
 ranted by even the crudest justice, was deliber- 
 ately and definitely abandoned by the undergrad- 
 uate body about twenty-five years ago, and the 
 faith has been kept ever since. 
 
 I was mediseval enough in college life and in- 
 struction to behold and even to share in some of 
 the obsolete methods of forcing good order. I 
 have seen with pain a president of the college 
 work his way to the center of a rush and emerge 
 therefrom with the massive club of contention 
 called a cane, while members of the faculty hov- 
 ered on the edges of the disturbance ordering men 
 by name to desist. I have seen another president 
 intercept a cane and its escort of mighty men, and 
 by force (constructively) take possession of the 
 stick and foil the stalwart combat troops. I have 
 seen a president repeatedly enter the Green to 
 shoo away students who were passing ball or 
 playing tennis during study hours — a painful 
 duty which no one else seemed disposed to under- 
 take. And — worse luck — I have been re- 
 peatedly summoned on the jjosse comitatus, ''to 
 assist the President in the Education and Govern- 
 ment of the Students," to maintain order, and 
 especially to interrupt some merry and porous 
 group engaged in absorbing the product of Bel- 
 lows Falls from a keg in Bedbug Alley or back 
 of Culver. It was all wrong; but these presidents 
 lacked moral courage to upset the precedents 
 handed down from earlier times, though no one 
 could charge them with lack of any other kind of 
 courage. 
 
104 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Doubtless there are occasions in the history of 
 every college when the highest authority must 
 intervene for good order. The occasion comes 
 when, by reason of some special excitement or 
 provocation, the students, for whom the college is 
 to some extent responsible, threaten the peace and 
 order of the community. Then, if the dean is 
 too light a weight for the emergency, the duty 
 may fall upon some highly respected member of 
 the faculty or even upon the president. There 
 are modern instances. But these are not oc- 
 casions for the use or show of physical force by 
 college officers. 
 
 The time has gone by let us hope, and in hoping 
 touch wood to confound the jinx, when college 
 faculties find it necessary to execute severe justice 
 by the wholesale upon ten, twenty, half a hundred 
 at a time. I have known it done. I have been 
 one of a tribunal without a dissenting vote. But 
 with what is known as afterwisdom I feel that 
 there was something wrong about it. Can it be 
 that in such discipline there was a prompting of 
 human irritation? Was there a feeling that the 
 law must be maintamed even if it broke some 
 one's suspenders? I know there was the mort- 
 main of precedent. For instance, *'It has always 
 been our custom to separate from college any 
 young man detected under the influence of in- 
 toxicating drink." I may have assented to that 
 notion once; I do not now. And let no one jump 
 to the conclusion that I favor or condone inebria- 
 tion. But youth is a time of experiment, and if 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 105 
 
 an adolescent experiments once with a dangerous 
 drug to his physical and mental detriment the 
 lesson may be very valuable. At any rate he is 
 not a danger to society until he repeats, thus sub- 
 stituting illustration for experiment. 
 
 But granting that in these cases of multiple 
 execution there was no avoidance of the next step 
 when the crisis arrived, I firmly believe that in 
 nearly all such college convulsions the wrong 
 chemicals had been mixed, or the right chemicals 
 had been left unmixed, by earlier carelessness or 
 clumsiness. College lads are like lambs or like 
 hornets according to the way you take them, and 
 their ideas of what is fair and just are often sur- 
 prising to their elders. Once a learned and 
 amiable member of the faculty — not the one you 
 think I mean — and his classes were furnishing 
 the college an illustration of mutual incompati- 
 bility, and I was one of a faculty committee to 
 meet representatives of the most riotous class in 
 an effort to save the situation. But their hearts 
 were hard to our statements. ''He doesn't even 
 keep order in his classes," they said! 
 
 In dealing with them it should be remembered 
 or known that when they are calm they are rea- 
 sonable, therefore reason like a vaccine should get 
 in its work before the contagion of excitement. 
 When responsibility is placed upon them they 
 take it as a sign that they have put on the toga of 
 manhood, hence an advantage of responsible 
 student councils. Marvelous rumors, fairy tales 
 or garbled verities, float about the college, potent 
 
106 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 for antagonisms, hence the wisdom of actively 
 spreading the truth abroad. There are a few, and 
 only a few, affairs in college management which 
 it is best to hold in secret. 
 
 The attitude of the public towards the collegian 
 is usually manifested by ferocious growling until 
 it comes to a showdown, when a sudden gentle- 
 ness develops. ''We mustn't be too hard on the 
 boys; we were boys ourselves once," is the idea. 
 If more of the public could see them in their 
 normal haunts, where the mass are quiet, orderly 
 and busy, their judgment would be better bal- 
 anced. The student has nerves; and he some- 
 times bays the moon. He is subject to lunar 
 rages which arise from dead calm, swell almost 
 to mob violence, and subside without a trace. 
 His offenses against the public are noise, often 
 out of place but not really criminal, and sins 
 against property — damage, destruction, appro- 
 priation, failure to meet obligation. From the re- 
 sulting predicaments he usually escapes on his 
 own terms — settling the bill. Less childish of- 
 fenses are often condoned. Once upon a time 
 the lone policeman of Hanover, in the discharge 
 of his duty, undertook the arrest of an erring 
 citizen. The plaints of the malefactor came to the 
 ears of a group of playful students who made 
 game of the officer of the law by roping and other- 
 wise impeding him with some roughness. The 
 constable, who was plucky and efficient but not 
 sympathetic, landed his quarry and then lodged 
 information higher up against his persecutors. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 107 
 
 It was necessary to sustain the officer, and the 
 case went to the grand jury before the session of 
 the county court. The grand jury dismissed it on 
 the ground that it was only a college boys' prank. 
 It was a lamentable failure of justice towards one 
 of the most unforgivable of minor offenses, and 
 yet there were law-abiding citizens even upon the 
 faculty who were glad the case went no farther. 
 We have known, have we not, of instructions is- 
 sued to the police in a large city to be very care- 
 ful of the college crowds publishing joy or drown- 
 ing sorrow after a big football game? The law, 
 the police regulations, cannot reach with any 
 evenness the college student in minor misconduct. 
 Public opinion will not permit it. I am sure that 
 the same could be said of public opinion and col- 
 lege discipline, if the public had an impulsive vote 
 with the half-knowledge which reaches it. 
 
 Itemized, the details which may call for censure 
 or excision are not numerous . 
 
 First of all is the ordeal of scholarly sufficiency. 
 There is objection to this test, but I do not think 
 the objection is reasonable. Whenever Hercules 
 or Sampson is ejected someone gets harsh ex- 
 postulations. The parents of ''Junior" may find 
 excellent reasons why the dear boy failed. But 
 after all it is not difficult to meet requirements 
 which consist so largely in being and doing what 
 all, if they choose, may be and do. If Samson 
 and Hercules and Junior will not, or in rare cases 
 cannot, cheer the instructor by their presence, get 
 in the theme, the report, or the experiment on 
 
108 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 time, focus attention upon the business of a short 
 hour, and study just a little now and then, they 
 may properly cede their places to those who will 
 perform aright. They are entitled to fair treat- 
 ment, and they get even more. Since they are 
 perhaps inexperienced in punctiliousness, poorly 
 trained at home, and unimpressed by information 
 that year after year the College is compelled to go 
 on without certain egocentric persons who will 
 not do their studies, they need and get most com- 
 petent supervision and warning before the final 
 disaster. They depart upon the record of that 
 which they have left undone, but always with op- 
 portunity for appeal and a hearing. 
 
 Extremely different is the case of Bill Sikes 
 who offends against the criminal code. He may 
 gamble, steal, do acts of violence, or become the 
 cause of public scandal. He is very uncommon; 
 but when one considers the thousands who pass 
 through any large college, it is not strange that in 
 certain circles his memory is fresh though not 
 fragrant. Some say that the law ought to get 
 him, and occasionally it does, but I do not think 
 the college ever turns him over to the law. It 
 even postpones action that might be prejudicial, 
 if legal processes are in operation. He cannot 
 stay in college to be a center of vice or crime, and 
 yet his case is now understood to be difficult and 
 delicate. He may need proper food, or the care 
 of a wise physician, or merely to grow up. To 
 make public his disgrace might ruin him for life ; 
 so where the matter is not already notorious Bill's 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 109 
 
 misdeeds are not published abroad, and he is 
 given the chance, in absence, which may, and 
 often does, restore him to sound manhood. 
 
 From the pranks of a crowd of students re- 
 leased from routine duty the beholder might sus- 
 pect a good deal of tomfoolery in the recitations 
 and lectures. But this would be a mistake. It 
 is not considered good sport. The individual who 
 tries it makes himself disliked all around. Com- 
 binations against scholarly sobriety have been 
 known, and that professor or young instructor 
 who has allowed his class room to become by prec- 
 edent or tradition the home of horseplay or 
 comedy has small chance of recovery. It may be 
 funny to have a whole class rise as one man, take 
 off their coats and hang them over the seat, and 
 a little later rise again and resume them, all with 
 perfect gravity and without visible signal, but it 
 is not intellectually stimulating. 
 
 "Cutting" in a body is obsolete as a game, be- 
 cause, with the liberal allowance of cuts and the 
 definition of their use, there is no great fun in 
 lawfully using up a cut which may be much more 
 valuable at another time. 
 
 Leaving out of consideration, then, delinquents 
 in scholarship, who are attended to in a well-de- 
 fined and impartial manner, college discipline of 
 the present time applies to the rather rare cases 
 called criminal, but requiring most careful treat- 
 ment, and minor eruptions of lawlessness and dis- 
 order upon which the public looks with great 
 leniency, and which the sinner gleefully recalls in 
 
110 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 the hearing of his sons in later years. It would 
 be difficult to draw a sharp line between the 
 malum prohibitum and the Tnalum per se upon 
 which President Smith used to discourse. A 
 malum per se is naturally a malum prohibitum; 
 and a Tnalum prohibitum (of which the fewer the 
 better) easily becomes a malum per se because it 
 is prohibitum. The simplest mind can discern the 
 difference between throwing snow-balls in the 
 college yard and cheating in examination, or 
 howling at the moving pictures and burglary, but 
 there might be argument about the immorality of 
 baiting a policeman, obtaining apples directly 
 from the orchard, or breaking the speed laws. 
 
 And where, by the way, is the ''Freshman 
 Bible"* which, with its prohibition of cards, and 
 of musical instruments during study hours, and 
 of disrespect to college officers, pointed out to us 
 the straight and narrow way? Gone, mute as the 
 harp that once through Tara's halls. 
 
 And that list of nicely graduated penalties is 
 probably now on a high shelf in the safe that 
 keeps the records. ''Reprimanded by the Presi- 
 dent?" It isn't done. The youth who needs it 
 will hear plain language in an official voice, but 
 not because he has been voted a reprimand. When 
 you consider, it is a difficult task to administer a 
 well-constructed and powerful reprimand to a 
 polite young man with shining hair who trust- 
 
 * This does not refer to the excellent Handbook issued 
 by the D. C. A., which might be called "The Freshman Bible, 
 Jr." 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 111 
 
 fully responds to your invitation to a dual meet, 
 without so softening it with the milk of human 
 kindness as to take out its sting and its official 
 tone. But humble '^probation" has grown to be 
 the mightiest word in the disciplinary armament. 
 Probation is nothing; but some way entangled in 
 the word is complete abstention from all those in- 
 terests which make it worth while to go to col- 
 lege, football, dramatics and the rest. The pun- 
 ishment fits the crime. "Rustication," mollified 
 as it was by the kindly clergyman and the village 
 belles, is no more. And there is good old irra- 
 tional ''suspension," gone. Not that it could not 
 be, but it is not. It put the sufferer and his in- 
 structors at a disadvantage for the remainder of 
 his college course. When he must go he is ''sepa- 
 rated from college," the dreadful uttermost pen- 
 alty of "expulsion" being so rare as to be almost 
 unknown to me. But in some peculiar cases, such, 
 for instance, as seem to arise from physical rather 
 than moral pathology, father is given "leave to 
 withdraw." 
 
 Although I have heard the mode of procedure 
 in the case of college misdemeanors questioned 
 and even criticised, I have never heard it defined. 
 I doubt if it has definition in terms; but all 
 methods of judicial action are of interest, and this 
 is a development away from execrable methods of 
 dealing with the young. In theory, it is the action 
 of a body whose prejudgement is favorable rather 
 than adverse or neutral to the respondent. Pun- 
 ishment of the culprit is not so much the aim as 
 
112 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 protection of his associates. The lasting and 
 often unjust effects of publicity are avoided. The 
 compulsions of criminal courts are absent. 
 Special weight is granted to the statements of the 
 individual under examination. And the process 
 is between man and man without professional 
 representatives. 
 
 The time was (within my memory) when the 
 whole faculty were judge, jury and executioner, 
 often to the disadvantage of the respondent, and 
 with occasional burlesque embellishments. A 
 selected group administer justice now, with 
 reference, occasionally, of peculiar cases to the 
 president or dean. No student is condemned 
 without opportunity for a hearing, but as there 
 is no authority for bringing his body before the 
 tribunal he may not escape judgment by refusing 
 to appear. He may be confronted by accusers; 
 usually he is not, as accusers of students are very 
 reluctant to appear. He is expected to answer 
 truthfully for himself, but is not asked or en- 
 couraged to give information concerning other 
 students. Unless there is good evidence that he 
 is lying his word is accepted. Since he gets the 
 benefit of presumption of truthfulness, lying is a 
 grave offense. 
 
 Plainly this is very different procedure from 
 that of the police court. It is not public. It com- 
 pels the presence of neither respondent nor wit- 
 nesses. It has not the sanction of the oath. It 
 does not give the respondent the benefit (if it is 
 a benefit) of silence. It is more like family 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 113 
 
 discipline. But it does substantial justice without 
 publicity. Possibly culprits have escaped by 
 reason of their own false testimony, but in long 
 experience I have never known an instance when 
 I thought the innocent was convicted. 
 
 "College Discipline" ordinarily has reference to 
 the corrective action of a professorial operating 
 force upon more or less raw material of students ; 
 there is, however, a re-action only to be suggested 
 delicately here. But at times apprentices have 
 been put in charge of our valuable young men, 
 who had less fitness for their job than a wise cat- 
 tle grower would require for his horses or his 
 steers. They quickly learn, or lost to sight be- 
 come to memory dear. 
 
 More than a hundred years ago, and therefore 
 safe to name, naughty professors Dean and 
 Carter of the University made a raid on the Social 
 Friends' library, and, caught by students of the 
 College, were placed in durance and finally led to 
 their homes by an escort of students, four to each 
 professor. There were breaking of doors, big 
 stick, arrests, but no penalties. 
 
 In more recent times an instructor of a little 
 brief authority — we can quote without hesita- 
 tion an alleged experience so different from that 
 of the rest of us as to be valueless for evidence — 
 announced in the class-room that he had heard 
 that Dartmouth students were a rough set, but 
 that having expected to find some gentlemen 
 among them he had not found one. I confess to 
 a constant and vain regret that some of his hear- 
 
114 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 ers who had not yet attained to the stature of per- 
 fect gentlemen, did not take him out and stand 
 him on his head in the snow. As a member of the 
 faculty I think I should have voted, "Not guilty, 
 but don't do it again." 
 
 In the progress of time nothing has developed 
 in college government so wholesome and genuine 
 as self-control through a representative group. 
 It supplements the power of the faculty at a point 
 of weakness, though I doubt if it ever could or 
 would displace wholly the authority of that body. 
 The intense, absurd, but normally harmless at- 
 tention paid to freshmen at the beginning of the 
 college year, dangerous from lack of any natural 
 limit in duration or repetition, is, as experience 
 shows, sensibly controlled by a strong group of 
 college leaders. And the same is true of some 
 bad customs that thrive in the dark. I heard with 
 great joy of the robust members of a student 
 council, who were in charge, administering a good 
 old-fashioned ''licking" to a cur who used the 
 buckle end of his belt-strap upon defenseless 
 victims in the rather doubtful ordeal of ''running 
 the gauntlet." Such leaders can give powerful 
 support to honesty in college work. They have 
 checked disorders that threatened to become riots. 
 Mental and moral defectives and those likely to 
 be judged criminals should, it would seem, wisely 
 be left to more mature discrimination. 
 
 Opinions concerning the present status of 
 athletics, and of the comparative morality in the 
 College today and forty or fifty years ago are not 
 within the plan and scope of this book. 
 
VII 
 
 RES ANGUSTAE 
 
 Friend Squoddy, with the caution of an elderly 
 person on an icy slope, was feeling his way 
 through a line or two of Latin poetry. It was 
 sight reading for old Squoddy because Professor 
 Parker, for once deceiving the trustful, had 
 shuffled the whole pack and Squoddy had recited 
 the day before. ''Res angustae domi, — things 
 — narrow things — of the house," he extem- 
 porized. The good professor, with a little haste 
 but with his unfailing courtesy and without even 
 a groan of anguish, interposed, "Well, well, it may 
 be so ; it may be so ; but don't you think 'straight- 
 ened circumstances at home' would give us a bet- 
 ter idea of the poet's meaning?" Squoddy paused 
 to reflect and to take a swift backward kick at 
 the neighbor who had driven his toe sharply into 
 the hollow of Squoddy's knee, and then with 
 obvious admiration accepted the professor's ren- 
 dering. The professor beamed with joy and cov- 
 ered Squoddy's presumable embarrassment by the 
 apt and sympathetic comment that many a young 
 man pursuing his way through college knew the 
 meaning of straitened circumstances at home 
 and of the sacrifices made for his education. 
 
 From an horizon of straitened circumstances 
 a day of small things naturally arises and con- 
 tinues. So it was at Dartmouth during the major 
 
 (115) 
 
116 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 part of the years since my first acquaintance. 
 The condition was even as bad as in the story told 
 me by an old grad of less than fifty and more 
 than forty years ago: ''When I came to college 
 we lived in Harmony, but my father soon moved 
 to Boston. For two years, however, I gave in my 
 name for the catalog as a resident of Harmony; 
 but the third year the Prof, said when he was 
 getting the enrollment, 'As long as your father 
 really lives in Boston won't you put in your name 
 as from there? We haven't got any one from 
 Boston, and we want to show at least one.' " This 
 was worse than the destitution of the drunkard's 
 home. The children called for bread and spinach 
 and calories and vitamines in vain, and as a last 
 hope they cried out for pie. "and there was no 
 PIE IN THE house!" There was no one from 
 Boston in the College! I believe this, so I have 
 not looked it up in the catalog. 
 
 But straitened circumstances and the day of 
 small things may be rich in satisfaction and good 
 cheer. Everything depends upon the proportion 
 in which the tranquillity and happiness of life are 
 derived from things or persons or ideas. 
 
 During the later period of penury, which ex- 
 tended well into the 90's, the salary of a "full 
 professor" had risen to $2,000, and this with re- 
 lation to the conditions of work and to the college 
 expenses in general was liberal. Rightly the pro- 
 portion followed the custom of the body and gave 
 preference to the brains. These salaries were the 
 consummation of three months' hope and trust; 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 117 
 
 but there was no assured pay-day even then. As 
 a personal favor however, the genial treasurer 
 would advance a few dollars to loosen the finan- 
 cial stringency and set new money in circulation. 
 Whether or not this $2,000 was more than what- 
 ever they do get today, in relation to what it 
 would buy, is an open question. Measured by 
 certain expenses which do not make the whole of 
 life, it was enough. We were clothed and warmed 
 and fed. Measured by the needs of scholars who 
 should live in the world and be a part of it, it fell 
 short. 
 
 There was food enough for hospitality, and at 
 those delightful supper parties served at separate 
 tables, the quality and abundance was up to the 
 best New England standard ; for there were not- 
 able housewives in those days, who provided an 
 excess of exceedingly good victuals which it was 
 the duty of the loquacious sisterhood in the 
 kitchen to keep from spoiling. Help was easily 
 obtained, and rarely was a family without one or 
 two maids who gladly allowed themselves to be 
 lent on these festal occasions. These parties, 
 which were numerous in the autumn when one or 
 two new members had been added to the faculty, 
 had for entertainment after the dishes had been 
 cleared away conversation, music, charades which 
 we thought very clever, and little games in which 
 the wits were caused to function pleasantly, like 
 writing impromptu verses or presenting brief 
 literary efforts, selected or original. And even if 
 I am the only one left to say so, I will declare that 
 
118 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 hospitality, music, and gambols of the mind are 
 more satisfactory sports for intelligent beings 
 than moving pictures, cards or dancing. This 
 statement is only comparative, and contains no 
 positive denunciation of the latter class. 
 
 Private hospitality had abundant opportunity 
 in those days, and met it well. As you see at 
 Commencement the long retinue of the 10-years 
 class — the wives keeping up with the procession 
 regardless of heat or fatigue, proudly flourishing 
 the showy parasols provided by the class tax, and 
 the little Billikins here and there inspecting 
 daddy's college whither they are coming by and 
 by — you wish to know where these welcome 
 ornaments of the occasion were stowed away in 
 the days of yore when there were neither dormi- 
 tories to give them shelter nor College Hall to 
 give them food. Well, they were not expected, 
 and they met the expectation. But there were 
 guests, and Commencement was a more intimate 
 family affair than at present. When the scant 
 accommodations of the Dartmouth Hotel had 
 been exhausted, the homes of the village were 
 opened, naturally for the more mature alumni 
 with their wives, if these chose to come. It was 
 perhaps as much a reunion of friends as of 
 classes. The young fellows could look out for 
 themselves ; and this they did without any vow to 
 silence. Then to fill the meeting-house and the 
 village a host appeared in the morning and 
 vanished at night. The Commencement ceremony 
 was a five-hours' orgy of oratory, during which 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 119 
 
 the auditory tide ebbed and flowed and was an 
 hungered. Some yielded to necessity and ex- 
 changed coin for sandwiches, peanuts or pie. But 
 the ladies of the faculty and other friendly per- 
 sons spread lunches, abundant, delicious and free, 
 and sent out to collect the unfed. The lunch must 
 be eaten. One of my older colleagues arrested me, 
 only a resident, upon the street, with an urgent 
 invitation to go around and eat his wife's lunch 
 and thus lessen her worry lest too few should 
 come in and partake. But the multitude was not 
 backward, and the lunches were seldom neglected. 
 My wife once asked a senior — he will not see 
 this — to bring in his friends, if any were here. 
 He came, and he brought thirteen with him who 
 ate and went away satisfied. 
 
 Taxes were a strangely unimportant item. The 
 first tax I paid on the house I now occupy was 
 $18.10; the last was over $200. But those con- 
 veniences, or as we now think necessities, for 
 which taxes pay were also unimportant. The 
 standard of living was a standard of isolation not 
 commensurable with the life of the remote world 
 of fashion. One can see now that the professors 
 who gave the College its strength suffered from 
 their inability to meet with men of similar in- 
 terests. Good, learned, self-denying teachers as 
 they were, their influence would have been more 
 virile if they could have conveyed to their 
 students the impression that they had ever been 
 out of Hanover. The salaries did not encourage 
 families, and one at least who brought up a group 
 
120 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 of children can testify that notwithstanding un- 
 desirable economy, he was unable for many years 
 to meet the necessary expenses except by outside 
 earnings. 
 
 If instruction represented the height of wise 
 expenditure, administration represented the depth 
 
 "Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot" 
 
 of distressing insufficiency. Today you see a fine 
 building, well-equipped, and wholly used for ad- 
 ministrative purposes. What had the College at 
 the time and during the period to which I refer? 
 Nothing; absolutely nothing. With enough per- 
 severance the treasurer might be found in his law 
 office over the old bank building; and the presi- 
 dent was often in his study at the house. Except 
 for such domestic arrangements as he might 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 121 
 
 make, no member of the faculty had an office or 
 anything corresponding thereto. He might have 
 a study, and that, with a longtailed coat and a 
 book, was enough. At present there is a consid- 
 erable library building, inadequate, but storing 
 or distributing 150,000 books, and capably ad- 
 ministered. The college library of those days, 
 well-hidden in the second story of Reed Hall, con- 
 
 Professor of Dust and Ashes 
 
 tained 17,000 books, and no one knew when the 
 lone librarian would drop around and unlock it; 
 I suppose there were regular hours, but who 
 would expect us to know them! The Society li- 
 braries offered freer access to about an equal 
 number of books. We drew for vacation choice 
 by lot, and for the long vacation we could take 
 away fourteen books, — seven from 1 to the 
 highest number, and seven more from the highest 
 number back to 1. 
 
122 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 At present the College gives steady employment 
 to about 175 who do not have class-room duties; 
 fifty years ago it had one full-time employe, the 
 worthy but overloaded Professor . of Dust and 
 Ashes. Student help, which ranged from extreme 
 fidelity to utter shif tlessness — only it was im- 
 possible to tell beforehand which it was going to 
 be — was employed on a part time scale ; and 
 carpenters, painters, and the like, when needed 
 were hired for the job. Considering the far-flung 
 precincts of the material college, the heating, 
 lighting, feeding, the stupendous current details 
 which enter into the daily book-keeping, the cor- 
 respondence, the publications, the records which 
 become history or statistics, only a rash person 
 would declare, without expert examination, that 
 too many are engaged in the business as dis- 
 tinguished from the instruction of the College. 
 If, as is reported, it costs $8,000 a year to main- 
 tain the daily roll of attendance, one can at least 
 imagine an institution in which this expense, 
 made necessary because of delinquents, could be 
 applied to something more productive, and the 
 burden of non-attendance carried by the records 
 of scholarship. 
 
 But what was the condition in a college set for 
 about one-fifth of the present number? The 
 President wrote his own letters, aided now and 
 then by some member of his family or by a 
 student who wrote a fair hand and could be 
 trusted. One student manipulated and pedaled 
 the little organ. There was no superintendent of 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 123 
 
 buildings, but upon some member of the faculty 
 was wished the office of "Inspector"; $100 was 
 added to his salary and he was bid go to it — let 
 the rooms, choose or help choose the wall papers, 
 appoint the student janitors to sweep and tend 
 the fires, invite the artisans to paint or paper or 
 saw wood, meet the emergencies and take the 
 blame. Another unhappy scholar was picked out 
 and compelled to be ''Clerk of the Faculty," upon 
 the same terms; and upon him fell the duties of 
 keeping the faculty records, the absences and the 
 individual marks, and of making out the standing 
 of the students three times a year. These term 
 marks he naturally gave out in the simplest man- 
 ner by handing a written list to some convenient 
 professor who distributed them in the class-room. 
 In my catalog of 1868-1869 I find in penciled 
 entries the marks of the freshman class of the 
 time, ranging from 1.11 to 2.59 on the weird 
 scale of 1 . for perfect and 5 . for zero. I note 
 also that of 80 freshmen of that year only 16 
 were in college rooms. 
 
 There was no sabbatical year or half year. Nor 
 had the generous subsidy to aid professors to be- 
 come acquainted with their learned and jovial 
 fellows at the annual meetings of the societies for 
 the concentration of knowledge been thought of. 
 Delegates to various organizations, less numerous 
 than now, paid their own expenses or stayed at 
 home; and a good many pairs of children's shoes 
 could be bought for the money which one of these 
 trips cost. Notice how essential it is for contact 
 
124 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 with modernity that artists and speakers of many 
 kinds and grades should bring their talents to 
 Hanover ; these advantages were not for the small 
 college and those who loved it. 
 
 Just what became of the professors who re- 
 signed before they died is not apparent. There 
 were not many. In Lord's History we read that 
 Dr. Sanborn, resigning in 1881 with insufficient 
 savings after forty-three years' service, was as- 
 sisted by an annual $500 contributed by friends. 
 A president of the College who retired in 1892 
 was given a pension of $1750 which was after- 
 wards cut to $1200. And this, I think, is the only 
 case of a pension by Dartmouth College until Mr. 
 Carnegie came to the rescue in 1906. 
 
 For audience rooms there was the meeting- 
 house for preferred, the old chapel for common, 
 and the gymnasium for special assemblies. Rob- 
 inson Hall was not even a dream, and such few 
 student organizations as there were floated 
 around without a home, except the Theological 
 Society which had a room with idols and things in 
 it. College Hall has wrought a marvelous change 
 in the humanity of the College. Before its con- 
 struction the College was in the condition of a 
 home without kitchen or dining-room — unable to 
 nourish its own or to offer hospitality to others. 
 Its operation may from time to time justify 
 criticisms which should be heeded, but their 
 weight is small when one considers what the Com- 
 mons has brought about in raising the standard 
 of alimentation throughout the village, in promot- 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 125 
 
 ing genial discussion of serious topics, and in en- 
 abling the College to be a gracious host to or- 
 ganizations from within and without. 
 
 In a former chapter, I have written of the 
 primitive conditions of heating, lighting, bathing. 
 If these had been the conditions of the civilized 
 world at the time they would not have been so 
 noteworthy; but they were not. While a little 
 hand tub was available to squirt water on a fire 
 until the horse-trough was empty or the soft- 
 handed fire fighters were themselves pumped out, 
 in the cities huge steamers were rushed with 
 spectacular action to drown the fires with water. 
 At that very time, in my home city, one of these 
 roaring monsters bore the name of ''Long John," 
 in honor of Mayor John Wentworth, Dartmouth, 
 1836. Nor can ignorance of water transmitted in 
 aqueducts and applied in hot and cold baths be 
 ascribed to a place of ancient learning. Although 
 at this time plumbing had not become the royal 
 art of the present, all the fixtures of what is often 
 called a modern bath room had been in use for 
 many years in modern communities. One of our 
 professors gained great local renown at a fire of 
 long ago. The fire company, discouraged before 
 the battle by the heart-breaking work necessary 
 to get the quickly-failing pipe-stem stream upon 
 the fire, had little of the present efficiency, and 
 their feeble and poorly directed efforts finally 
 forced a student to explode with a volley of those 
 words which at that time were purged of evil in 
 print by 2-em dashes in their middle. Professor 
 
126 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 Wiseman heard it all and placing his hand on the 
 young man's shoulder said gravely, 'Thank you, 
 sir." 
 
 The Dartmouth was a solemn brown pamphlet 
 published monthly, and each editor, having sole 
 responsibility for his number, would beg his 
 friends for literary contributions. The Aegis, a 
 little paper-covered thing of about forty pages, 
 was published twice a year. The number issued 
 in the summer term of 1870, of which Charles F. 
 Richardson was one of the two editors, contains 
 lists of the members of the five fraternities which 
 continue under the same name, of the Social 
 Friends and of the United Fraternity, of the two 
 freshman societies, and of the ten members of 
 the Handel Society. It lists a ''quintette" which 
 was very good — it was rumored, by the way, that 
 this quintette glee club had swallow-tailed coats 
 which they wore on their infrequent trips, — a 
 couple of minor musical organizations, seven 
 baseball nines, class officers, a telegraph company, 
 three burlesque groups, and the membership of 
 the Theological and Missionary Association, in 
 which are found the names of Francis Brown, 
 Lemuel S. Hastings, Bishops Leonard and Talbot, 
 Marvin D. Bisbee, Francis E. Clark, and many 
 others since well known in Hanover. (I do not 
 know anything that marks more the chasm be- 
 tween that world and this than the custom on 
 obscure student authority — obscure even now to 
 me — of dividing all the members of the faculty 
 among the four student prayer meetings on the 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 127 
 
 Day of Prayer for Colleges.) The editorials of 
 this Aegis are highly interesting. There is even 
 then the call for a bath-room and for elective 
 studies. A Commencement earlier than the next 
 to the last Thursday in July is prayed for. There 
 is an account of the laying of the cornerstone of 
 Culver Hall with the statement that the imported 
 band's idea of an appropriate tune for the oc- 
 casion was, *Tut me in my little bed." There is 
 the declaration that ''the building is really to be 
 handsome and commodious," and the conclusion, 
 *'We had never expected to see with these mortal 
 eyes a new building at Dartmouth, and now we 
 hope that this one will be followed by a new 
 dormitory, a chapel, and all the other buildings 
 which have already been commenced on paper." 
 Our most proudly exhibited recitation room was 
 the North Latin room. If you were to enter 
 Dartmouth Hall by the south door, proceed half- 
 way through the building, then turn sharply to 
 the left and go through the partition wall into 
 the lecture room you would be within the shade, 
 the astral body as it were, of the North Latin 
 room. It had recent settees in place of the 
 ancient benches; and I seem to remember large 
 photographs upon its walls — the Roman Forum, 
 the Coliseum, the Arch of Titus, perhaps. Why 
 the South Greek room, similarly situated at the 
 other end of the building, was held inferior I do 
 not know ; but it was, perhaps because there was 
 more flunking in it. On the 2d floor of Dart- 
 mouth Hall was the Senior room, of a peculiar 
 
128 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 sanctity which was fostered if not wholly inspired 
 by Dr. Noyes. A recitation room was a recitation 
 room, and if there were a chair and a table on a 
 platform for the professor and seats for the 
 students there would be no occasion for any one 
 to boast about Mark Hopkins and the log. 
 
 The time to which I refer — 1868 just now — 
 belongs to a period when if an institution of 
 learning possessed a laboratory of any kind for 
 student work it had the right to point with pride. 
 So far as I have been able to learn Dartmouth had 
 none. There are a few rays of circumstantial evi- 
 dence that somewhere and somehow the students 
 in the Chandler School had a little ''practical" 
 chemistry, but I have never found out where or 
 how. There was one course fairly in the same 
 class with laboratory work — field work in sur- 
 veying required of the whole sophomore class. 
 Imagine being privileged to seek knowledge and 
 skill out of doors in the early fall, while yet the 
 sun was warm, the grass green, the foliage un- 
 thinned, and the fuliginous river fog foretold a 
 gladsome day! The class was divided into 
 squads of eight, with director and register com- 
 mittee on observation and calculation appointed 
 by the professor on the basis of marks in mathe- 
 matics, and a committee on apples appointed by 
 the squad on the basis of specialized acquisitive- 
 ness. And neither committee was to be disturbed 
 in its duties by other members of the squad. 
 There was no occasion to worry because the Col- 
 lege had no ill-smelling laboratories. A little later 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 129 
 
 by arrangement with the Agricultural College 
 there was opportunity for seniors to have some 
 laboratory work in Chemistry in the newly built 
 Culver Hall. 
 
 The village had no welcome for newcomers. I 
 mean the village, and not its inhabitants. The 
 writer was told by Treasurer F. Chase, with 
 prophetic truth, that to get a house he would have 
 to wait for someone to die. All the houses were 
 occupied, and the land since available for build- 
 ing purposes was held in large tracts and was 
 not then for sale. Nearly, if not quite, half the 
 residences of the village are on lands then held 
 for farms or hay fields. President Bartlett, who 
 came to the College in 1877, was no better off 
 than other intruders into the closed village, and 
 for several years went from one temporary 
 shelter to another — the Dartmouth Hotel, Mrs. 
 Thomas Crosby's, Professor Emerson's during his 
 absence in Europe — until at his prompting the 
 Trustees, with the purchase of the Noyes house, 
 established the custom of maintaining a home for 
 the president of the College. 
 
 One of the very good customs of the days of 
 small things was the Senior Party given by the 
 president a few weeks before Commencement. 
 Personal invitations were sent to the Seniors and 
 such friends of theirs as might be in Hanover at 
 the time, to the social element in the village, and 
 to friends of the College in neighboring towns — 
 Lebanon, West Lebanon and Hartford. It was 
 
130 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 always an interesting question which and how 
 many of these bespoken ones would reply to the 
 polite notes of invitation. The seniors appeared 
 in reasonable numbers ; the guests from the neigh- 
 boring villages were at pains to be present; 
 ''mixers" were appointed to stimulate circulation, 
 and the usual good time was had by all. The 
 party was held in the president's house when he 
 had one. During the time when he was house- 
 less one of the best of the gatherings was held in 
 the old 'Thilosophical Room" in Reed Hall, and 
 members of the president's family took off their 
 coats or rolled up their sleeves and ladled out ice- 
 cream for the multitude. The Senior Party per- 
 tained to the old style of home-made hospitality, 
 to the simple era when people found entertain- 
 ment in meeting one another and joy in exercising 
 their own wits. It brought to the College a very 
 desirable group of neighbors, and recognized, if 
 only tacitly, the common migration from the old 
 Connecticut homes. Within a few weeks one of 
 the oldest of the guests was recalling with great 
 pleasure these occasions which used to bring him 
 and his wife on social missions to Hanover. With 
 the great growth of the College this form of inter- 
 community had to pass away. Extinct also, like 
 the old Pine and the Senior Party, is the pleasant 
 custom of faculty reception evenings, which for 
 a time more than half of the members of the 
 classes appreciated by their presence. We have 
 the omelet, but the eggs are broken. 
 
 In June, 1878, the Trustees appointed an Asso- 
 
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 OS 
 
 s 
 
 o 
 o 
 
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 U 
 
 a 
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132 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 ciate Professor of Chemistry at a salary of $1500. 
 He was associated, because Dr. Oliver Payson 
 Hubbard was Professor of Chemistry, though for 
 many years his relation to the College had been 
 as lecturer in the Medical School. This associate 
 professor after using up a leave of absence, ar- 
 rived in March and began to look around for 
 those material objects which go with a professor 
 of chemistry. He found to his surprise that the 
 College was unable to offer him one square foot 
 of separate and distinct territory, and that his 
 outfit, when he found a place to put it, would con- 
 sist of a little apparatus of small value, the 
 equity of the College in stock held by the Agri- 
 cultural College, and what he could buy with an 
 appropriation of $200. The work of the depart- 
 ment was to be done in Culver Hall, a building of 
 joint ownership, but in the custody of the New 
 Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Me- 
 chanic Arts. It surely presented a situation for 
 controversy and real trouble. There was one 
 lecture room and one laboratory room and two 
 men teaching chemistry to two distinct and im- 
 miscible groups of students. Hours, of course, 
 had to be arranged for the use of the lecture room, 
 and a gentleman's agreement was negotiated to 
 leave no illustrative material around in one an- 
 other's way. An attempt was made to get along 
 with opposite ends of the laboratory, but, as that 
 proved impracticable from the easy mixing of 
 movables, a slight partition running half way to 
 the ceiling was set up, and the associate professor 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 133 
 
 found himself in possession of 24 tables and a 
 closet, with standing-room only. This condition 
 of two families in the same house continued until 
 the removal of the New Hampshire College from 
 Hanover in 1893. That it existed without friction 
 or accumulated ill feeling is not wholly due to the 
 pacific nature of the parties thus tied together. 
 It was like the case of the female whose relative 
 by marriage when asked if she was reconciled to 
 departing from this life, replied: "She jolly well 
 had to be." 
 
 Slowly, very slowly, almost inch by inch, the 
 chemistry department pervaded, infiltrated Culver 
 Hall. Its progress was aided by the imperfect 
 ventilation of the building; and aliens, chemically 
 speaking, gradually manifested an active prefer- 
 ence for the nameless smells of a close room 
 somewhere else to the clean and namable though 
 perhaps too distinct odors of scientific prepara- 
 tion there diffused. The building became un- 
 popular. And thus and otherwise, from nothing, 
 in the course of many years Chemistry got pos- 
 session of the whole building ; and the migration 
 into the beautiful new Steele Laboratory was but 
 the natural translation. 
 
 Culver was not heated by steam or by anything 
 else. The impediments to freezing were stoves 
 needing constant feeding which they did not get, 
 and a viciously inefficient wood furnace under the 
 laboratory. Many a time the professor, after the 
 manner of the district school, was compelled to 
 call for volunteers from his class to accompany 
 
134 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 him to the cellar for fuel, generally getting a 
 hearty response from the whole class. It froze 
 in the laboratory, only occasionally hard enough 
 to split the pipes; but, owing to the necessity of 
 meeting an early schedule and of avoiding con- 
 flicts, much preparation had to be made before 
 the classes came from chapel, with fingers so 
 numb that the sight of blood from a cut or scratch 
 was the first intimation of injury. For a time 
 there was gas, Hanover gas, that peculiar semi- 
 vaporous substance made on the spot and dis- 
 tributed to consumers at $10 a thousand until ruin 
 stared maker and user in the face. After that 
 for a long time the only heat for chemical pur- 
 poses was obtained from little alcohol lamps. The 
 professor was absolutely without assistance even 
 from a helping janitor. But he had only to pre- 
 pare and take down experiments and illustrations 
 for the class-room, wash the dishes, make up the 
 reagents, give out all materials needed by 
 students in the laboratory, keep up supplies and 
 accounts and records, tend the fires in emergen- 
 cies, dust the tables, circulate among the workers 
 and catch them by intuition just before they 
 made a fatal blunder, examine the note-books, 
 have recitations and lectures, lay out courses 
 which could be carried on under the limited con- 
 ditions, and all the time strive to build up a reg- 
 ular department of chemistry. Oh, it was a busy 
 life! At times, as a nice little family accumu- 
 lated, there would be for a treat a picnic down to 
 Culver to unpack invoices of chemicals or ap- 
 
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136 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 paratus. Relief came gradually, by volunteer 
 student help, by students paid by the hour, by 
 graduate students, by a full time helper, a prac- 
 tical janitor, and so on to the present ac- 
 complished staff. 
 
 I should like to enlarge upon the two little 
 stoves at the south end of the Meeting-house with 
 the rods of dripping pipe under the galleries de- 
 livering what was left of the smoke into the twin 
 chimneys on the north, upon the choir loft over 
 the door, upon the Thursday evenings rigidly re- 
 served for the mid-week meetings to the exclusion 
 of all other entertainments, sacred or profane. I 
 should like to tell of the excitement among the 
 required attendants at the Sunday services when 
 Dr. Leeds solemnly said, ''I pass," or rhetorically 
 raised his voice to cry, **Wake, Christian 
 brother !" ; or when the visiting clergyman in tell- 
 ing of his service at the State's prison said, ''They 
 were all there; they had to be." The social and 
 inexpensive decoration of the church for Com- 
 mencement, and the rich bouquets presented to 
 the speakers are items of interest. Much might 
 be said of the forlorn lot of the sick student — 
 for measles, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping 
 cough and something just as good as the grip 
 flourished then — shut up in his dirty room and 
 in his unchanged bed and tended only by his 
 kindly but erratic fellows; and of the winter 
 hibernation with occasional giddy awakening 
 when Anna Dickinson, General Kilpatrick, 
 Camilla Urso, or the Jubilee Singers broke in; 
 
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138 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 and of the inevitable February row of some kind 
 in the College. But there must be consideration 
 of the limitations of space, time and patience. 
 
 Times change and we have changed with them. 
 Those were hard and happy days, and their recol- 
 lection calls for no pity. 
 
VIII 
 
 TEACHING SCHOOL 
 
 Beloved Reader, has Teaching School ever hap- 
 pened into your life? If so, you will understand 
 why I take my pen in hand to write of it as one 
 of those casual jobs like Sawing Wood or Wash- 
 ing Windows or Digging Potatoes which may en- 
 gage the attention of great intellects for a short 
 time without lasting damage. 
 
 I do not now refer to the occupancy, with that 
 consciously noble feeling, of a college chair or 
 demi-chair. I do not mean the jovian, also 
 saturnine, pinnacle of head-master. It is not 
 teaching school to preside over a fifth grade room 
 in a well-ordered department store of learning, 
 where violence is unknown, and whither the 
 janitor, the principal, or the policeman can be 
 summoned at a minute's notice. 
 
 Teaching School belongs to those days when 
 our country was young or mid-Victorian, and 
 when the primary qualification was not knowl- 
 edge, but the strong right hand, the power to 
 manage, the possession of ''good discipline." A 
 large wallop was worth more than many good in- 
 tentions; and if some high-minded pacifist was 
 propelled rapidly from the warm schoolroom into 
 a chilly bank of snow, an immense guffaw broke 
 forth around the red-hot stove in the store. But 
 they were fair-minded in the store, and the black 
 
 (139) 
 
140 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 eye of any aspiring youth who some way failed 
 to remove the teacher from his proper scene of 
 labor was just as good a joke; and the spokesman 
 of the Diet of Crackers would allow, ''thet thur 
 wuz sum chanst of them young divvils gettin' an 
 eddication after all". 
 
 Anyone might try his hand at the job; but it 
 was not outside of the rules for the teacher to 
 know something, since the only entrance condi- 
 tion to the winter school was living within walk- 
 ing distance. While the teacher was sure to have 
 a class in the simple literature of ''The cat has 
 got a rat. It is a fat rat. Do not put the fat rat 
 in my hat," many a youth who was to be heard 
 from later cherished a longing to set his teeth 
 into the binomial theorem, or to read Caesar even 
 if he had to stay after school to get the time. It 
 was doubtful whether it was right to parse the 
 Bible, but if the teacher could not parse any word 
 that Shakespeare ever set down, it was told in 
 the homes — with joy if he had not made friends, 
 with disappointment if they liked him. He was 
 expected to solve any puzzle in arithmetic at 
 once, or at any rate, ''as soon as he had time." 
 And sly old codgers who played checkers at the 
 tavern, often as late as nine o'clock, used to copy 
 from the puzzle department of the weekly Gazette 
 fearful problems in compound interest, the rule 
 of three, alligation, or about such sinful doings 
 as buying huckleberries by dry measure and 
 selling them as liquids, and send them in by one 
 of the boys. Mental arithmetic, like fish, was held 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 141 
 
 to be a great source of mental power; and the 
 teacher, at a moment's notice, had to put together 
 or undo these tangled numbers: "If 18 is Vo of 
 -/g of V4 of some number, what is Vo of 5 times 
 the same number?" Or the details of building 
 such and such a wall with so many men in 20 
 days, and then hurrying up the job to get a 
 multiplied wall built in half the time by how 
 many men; occasionally infesting the situation 
 with boys, with the assumption that it took three 
 boys to do the work of one man. He was obliged 
 to spend one painful evening in checkers at the 
 tavern, though the experts there assembled had 
 his measure after the third move. "College was 
 a darned onpractical place," they agreed among 
 themselves. But they would hardly ever allude 
 to the matter again in the teacher's presence, ex- 
 cept now and then to speak with wooden faces of 
 "thet ther night when we hed them checker 
 games, y'know," or archly to remark of the 
 preacher or some other worthy, "He's all right, 
 but he can't play checkers for sour apples." 
 
 It appears from the catalog for 1868-1869 that 
 the fall term of the College closed Thursday 
 night, November 26th, for a vacation of six weeks. 
 It does not appear that after the vacation came a 
 term of fifteen weeks from which the student, if 
 properly excused, might take the first six weeks 
 for teaching without the burden of making up. 
 This was the time when the knights of the ruler 
 and the spelling book went forth to carry order 
 and light, to return with cash and experience. 
 
142 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 About two-thirds of the mid-century graduates 
 had taught a winter school as part of their educa- 
 tion. Shortened vacation and greater stringency 
 in making up rendered this custom impracticable 
 after about 1890. 
 
 The first six weeks of the winter term were rich 
 in mental food and 0, how lonesome; but there 
 was escape by way of the conventional plea, 
 ^'necessity." For the faculty demanded necessity. 
 And necessity was a relative matter depending on 
 conditions. One form of necessity was to avoid 
 calling on father for another check; another was 
 to gather Experience, the grand qualification for 
 two or three years of gainful teaching after grad- 
 uation, and it was well known and encouraging to 
 suppliants that certain members of the faculty 
 looked with approval upon this form of necessity. 
 And still another form of necessity was to secure 
 the wherewithal for food until the summer hotels 
 were ready. Much depended on definition, the 
 respect of the applicant for the truth, and the 
 mood of the excuser. No one had yet attained to 
 the pleasant humor of the student who, at a later 
 time when each professor excused absences, 
 printed and distributed application blanks with 
 ''Reason: Sickness'' upon the whole edition. 
 
 A second prerequisite for teaching a winter 
 school was like that for cooking a rabbit — first 
 catch your rabbit; first catch your school. Schools 
 were caught from the inquiries of school boards 
 addressed to some member of the faculty; such 
 applications seldom found their way to novices, as 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 143 
 
 the recipient invariably passed them along to ac- 
 quaintances who had already gathered experi- 
 ence. Or the discarded opportunities of better, 
 that is of experienced, men were picked up : when 
 a man had managed well his winter school it was 
 usual to recognize a sort of reservation, the school 
 holding the man and the man holding the school, 
 without binding obligations in either case; then 
 if the teacher secured a better paying school he 
 considered himself both obliged and privileged 
 to offer a substitute. And there remained the 
 casual methods of writing, inquiring, and answer- 
 ing advertisements. Supply and demand nearly 
 balanced. It was generally understood about col- 
 lege that getting a school was much more im- 
 portant than teaching a school. It was held that 
 with a little luck one could worry through and 
 get his pay, notwithstanding the blood-curdling 
 yarns which floated in from Cape Cod and other 
 savage regions. 
 
 At this time Mr. Whittier had preserved in 
 S7102V Bound a poetical ideal of the pedagogue 
 from Dartmouth's Classic Halls, which, while 
 feeding local pride, caused wonder where he got 
 it. And "Mary" (born Darius) Newman, 
 pressed by the necessity of teaching for experi- 
 ence, held the opinion that he met one of the poet's 
 specifications, since, in a hairy generation, upon 
 his features "scarce appeared the uncertain 
 prophecy of beard." 
 
 A first time is inevitable if it happens at all; 
 and all experience has a beginning. So Mary, 
 
144 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 hereafter to be called Darius, engaged himself to 
 a three-months school at $44 a month, with the 
 drawback of $5 a week for room and board; 
 travel and sundries were naturally at his own ex- 
 pense. So he would have more experience than 
 cash in the net return. By familiar modes of 
 travel, with a stage coach for the end of the 
 journey, he reached the corner of an often-men- 
 tioned and now highly civilized town which had 
 two nuclei of population, — West Hopeton and 
 Hopeton Center, and which carried on the manu- 
 facture of small articles of wood in the modest 
 and comfortable New England fashion of many 
 years ago. 
 
 After being delivered at his pre-arranged 
 boarding place in West Hopeton, Darius' first 
 duty was to present himself to the chairman of 
 the school board for examination, since without 
 a certificate obtained by examination no one could 
 be paid from the public money. According to in- 
 structions he sought Jacob Nickleby in his gen- 
 eral store in Hopeton Center. It was not Jacob's 
 custom to talk unless he had something to say, so 
 he made no comment on the apparent unfitness of 
 the youthful Darius to master a winter school, 
 of no uncommon turbulence, but which was 
 certain to try any teacher out and to take the up- 
 per hand of him if possible. He proceeded to his 
 standard examination of five questions, to be an- 
 swered by word of mouth, for shrewd old Jacob 
 said that he could tell more from the way they an- 
 swered than from what they said. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 145 
 Grammar — Analyze and parse till I stop you : 
 
 "To be or not to be, that is the question. — 
 Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer 
 The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; 
 Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, 
 And, by opposing, end them?" 
 
 History — Name all the presidents and vice- 
 presidents of the United States. 
 
 Geography — What states and territories are 
 crossed by the 42d parallel? 
 
 Arithmetic — Why do you invert the terms of 
 a fraction in division? 
 
 Pedagogy — (His pet question) — State your 
 methods. 
 
 The young collegian sadly messed his unpre- 
 meditated answers, but you would have messed 
 them too. Jacob Nickleby was silent for a time. 
 Then he made some marks on the back of an 
 envelope. He was an amiable dissembler, but he 
 loved to pose, and to scare the college fellers. 
 
 ''Wal," he said at last, ''ye done about as well 
 as I thought ye would." And having thus given 
 evidence of his profundity he issued the certifi- 
 cate. 
 
 Darius' boarding place, while it gave him a new 
 experience of family life, offered the great es- 
 sentials of simplicity, comfort and kindness. Mr. 
 Carrill was agent, manager and treasurer of a 
 profitable little mill making broom-sticks; Mrs. 
 Carrill was a notable house-keeper of the type 
 that keeps house for the family and not the family 
 
 *io 
 
146 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 for the house; Roger and Anna were their chil- 
 dren, and Katy O'Brien was household helper and 
 one of the family. Roger and Anna attended the 
 high school at the Center, and Katy O'Brien had 
 done with schooling; so the youthful teacher was 
 under no strain to envelope himself in a cloud of 
 dignity out of school. And the four young people 
 played games and frolicked in the usual very 
 youthful way. Darius helped on many an alge- 
 braic puzzle and many a tangle in the language 
 which Virgil picked out for the Aeneid, and now 
 and then filled the wood-box for Katy when she 
 was in a hurry with her soda biscuits. The house- 
 hold became friendly to Darius. 
 
 But teaching is an art ; and the management of 
 a school is a game of skill; and Darius now dis- 
 covered that he had neither the art nor the skill. 
 In order to be taught the pupils must have at 
 least some inclination to learn. And the simplest 
 of all modes of management consists in inspiring 
 a willingness to be managed. Big girls aware of 
 their immunity from well-deserved strapping can 
 simply emanate sauciness and rebellion. Little 
 girls can stick out their tongues and giggle ir- 
 repressibly and irresponsibly. Large, overgrown 
 boys can trip one another in the aisles while their 
 eyes roll innocently to heaven and their lips frame 
 the words of their spelling lesson. And the small 
 boys, falling into the mood of the occasion, can 
 drop their slates on the floor, or land spit-balls on 
 the blackboard when the teacher's back is turned. 
 With the great girls as allies the school is nearly 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 147 
 
 conquered, though the larger boys may have some 
 affairs of their own to settle with the teacher first. 
 
 When Darius Newman entered the little white 
 one-room schoolhouse on the Monday morning, it 
 seemed as though children by the hundred were 
 playing tag and lifting up their voices in the 
 room. By count forty pairs of eyes were directed 
 upon him in the calm which followed his entrance, 
 and their owners were prepared to be either 
 friendly or hostile as might be determined later. 
 He smiled — of course the well-known ''queer 
 twisted smile" — but he had that feeling of being 
 both the dinner and the after-dinner speaker. It 
 was an ungraded school, and boys were there 
 larger and heavier than himself, girls with their 
 hair done in the latest mode, evidently young 
 ladies after four o'clock, and children who 
 scarcely could be expected to read. One of those 
 great girls smiled at him; this was favorable. 
 One of a group of large boys at the back of the 
 room put forth an irresistible jest which Darius 
 knew was at his expense although he could not 
 hear it; and this was unfavorable. In some way 
 — Darius never knew how — the school was or- 
 ganized into just half as many classes as there 
 were scholars in the school ; and as all the classes 
 would not recite daily this allowed about twenty 
 minutes for each class ; and three of the big girls, 
 who for reasons of their own wished to begin 
 Latin, had to recite after school on stated days. 
 
 Days went by and the business of education did 
 not run smoothly. Those great girls showed no 
 
148 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 preference for law and order; the large vealy 
 youths were as impudent as they dared to be and 
 were evidently looking for a chance to mutiny; 
 and the little ones were mischievous and merry. 
 The school was untamed. The run upon the water 
 pail for a drink was too steady for a country 
 where salt codfish was little used; there were too 
 many imperative demands to go out; the larger 
 girls would rise and leave the room without ask- 
 ing, much to Darius' perplexity, as they were well 
 aware that he lacked the assurance to put the 
 usual question, ''Is it necessary?" Occasionally a 
 book would be thrown across the room when his 
 back was turned, or a piece of chalk dexterously 
 snapped would hit him as he attempted to explain 
 some problem at the blackboard, and when one of 
 the big girls would engage his attention with 
 some unnecessary question it was the occasion for 
 snickering glee. Darius was himself contributing 
 to the unhappy condition by over-sensitiveness to 
 the unintended disorders of the room in seeing too 
 much which a good teacher, knowing childish 
 restlessness, manages not to see, and by undiluted 
 rigor in the use of the recitation periods, which 
 his desire to accommodate every one had made 
 very short. 
 
 The intellectual demands were not overtaxing 
 after the start, but analysis and parsing done by 
 the large girls with lightning tongues regardless 
 of where they hit was something quaint and un- 
 heard of. They could take the longest sentence 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 149 
 
 and without pausing or faltering put every ele- 
 ment into its place for better or worse, thus: 
 "It is a compound declarative sentence of which 
 
 the first member is and the second member 
 
 is the logical subject of the first member is 
 
 and the logical predicate is the sim- 
 ple subject is and the simple predicate is 
 
 the simple subject is modified by an 
 
 adjective phrase consisting of " and so 
 
 forth, just like that, without any stops, until every 
 word had been put into its grammatical cell and 
 the sentence was completely wrecked. It was 
 marvelous. It was stupendous. And Darius was 
 like the dog tied to the express train, until just 
 by good luck he discovered that speed was cover- 
 ing a multitude of sins. So he plunged into the 
 verbal flood with a pointed correction; and that 
 carried him through the hour. The next day he 
 had mastered the scheme, but he was never quite 
 able to keep up with the winged tongues. Who 
 does analysis and parsing now? 
 
 "Rhetoricals" once a week, the dreaded time of 
 compositions and declamations, was opportunity 
 for the maximum of disorder and insolence. 
 Darius was too inexperienced in his business to 
 know that all pieces to be spoken should have re- 
 ceived his approval in advance. Consequently his 
 audacious pupils made the occasion a glorious 
 farce. 
 
 On a memorable Friday the first speaker, with 
 abnormal sobriety, delivered himself thus : 
 
150 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 "Fishy, fishy in the brook ; 
 Bobby catcli him with a hook ; 
 Mammy fry him in a pan, 
 Bobby eat him like a man." 
 
 And after the applause had subsided, his suc- 
 cessor began with a grandiloquent voice but ended 
 with the snick of a suppressed laugh at the back 
 of his nose: 
 
 "The thunder roared, 
 The clouds grew big, 
 And killed a pig." 
 
 And the way now being clear, the next one gave 
 evidence of collaboration with his predecessor by 
 declaiming : 
 
 "The thunder roared. 
 
 The lightning crashed, 
 
 And broke grandma's teapot all to smash." 
 
 While the last speaker for the day, with a wink 
 at the girls, and choking with his own humor at 
 the end of each line, presented : 
 
 "The rose is red. 
 The violet is blue, 
 The grass is green, 
 And so are you." 
 
 The truth was beginning to appear to Darius that 
 those boys needed a licking, and he was a peace- 
 ful person. Also several of the boys overtopped 
 and outweighed him. 
 
 Now the Carrill family knew that there was 
 trouble in the school, without giving Darius a 
 hint of their knowledge. They were his friends, 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 151 
 
 but they could not fight his battles for him. Mr. 
 Carrill was a man of influence in the town, and 
 school committeeman Nickleby had said to him, 
 'They're raising hell with that little college feller 
 down to your place. I'll give him another week, 
 and then he'll hev to go or they'll all be spiled." 
 Mr. Carrill replied, ''He's young, and he's green, 
 but I'll bet you a gallon of cider he gets them yet." 
 
 Perhaps Darius would not have got them if they 
 had not made the wrong move themselves. They 
 laid their plans — five of them — and told the 
 loungers in the adjacent store that they were sick 
 of the teacher and were going to put him out. 
 The store-keeper, who was looking for a little 
 sport, said, "You better look out; maybe he bites." 
 
 "Gosh," was the answer, "he wouldn't hurt a 
 skeeter, and if he tried it any of us could lick 
 him with one hand tied behind us." 
 
 It only remained for the conspirators to hit 
 upon something so utterly insubordinate that the 
 teacher would be driven to action. 
 
 And they did. 
 
 As they were not subtly inventive they adopted 
 the simple plan of hanging around the school 
 door after the bell rang and coming in when they 
 got ready, with self-conscious grins on their faces 
 and defiant clumps of their boots on the floor. 
 The quiet of the room was ominous. One of the 
 lesser youths said afterwards, "You could have 
 heard a gumdrop," which was probably facetious. 
 
 Randolph Robinson, a sturdy, thick-headed and 
 mischievous youth, had a seat in front where the 
 
152 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 teacher could watch him, but the other four, ac- 
 cording to the enforced system of back seats for 
 big boys, were grouped in the rear of the room. 
 
 ''Randolph," said the exasperated teacher, 
 *'what does this mean?" 
 
 ''What does what mean?" was the irritating in- 
 spiration of Randolph's kind of brains. 
 
 "You come ^here," said Darius. 
 
 Teacher was acting as expected, except that his 
 voice didn't sound quite right. 
 
 The chief movable properties of the school lay 
 upon the teacher's table — a Testament and a few 
 other books, a bell, a box of crayons, and a service- 
 able ruler which Darius had mentally discarded 
 as too brutal an implement for his pedagogic 
 methods. He loved it now. 
 
 Randolph Robinson sauntered a few steps 
 closer, and the rest of the gang edged a little 
 nearer to the aisle. They were going to do their 
 part. The sturdy Randolph and the teacher with 
 the practical ruler met in front of the table. 
 Randolph, cunning for the advantage of the at- 
 tack, sprang for a grapple without any warning. 
 He missed his aim because of Darius' quickness 
 upon his feet, but did secure a bull-dog grip upon 
 the latter's left arm; and the four reserves 
 jumped from their seats to finish the good work 
 Randolph had so well begun. An impartial spec- 
 tator would have had a vision of a vacant chair 
 in the school room and a hole in the snow the size 
 of the gentle teacher who did not believe in cor- 
 poral punishment. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 153 
 
 Darius had a stick, and in the letter which he 
 afterwards wrote to his mother he expressed his 
 everlasting thanks that it was not an ax, for it 
 fell across the side of Randolph's head with a 
 xylophonic clang, and blood gushed out and 
 flowed over Randolph's face and down upon his 
 collar. 
 
 Four charging youths — they were only 
 naughty boys — flashed from the aisle to their 
 seats with the suddenness of a mouse-trap. 
 
 Confusion reigned in the little room. The 
 great girls moaned and cried, "Shame !" ''0, how 
 horrid!" ''Aint it awful!" 'The brute!" The 
 little girls sobbed. The boys who knew what they 
 deserved assumed an apathy which covered cold 
 feet. An unexpected tempest had broken loose. 
 Little Millie Robinson, with eyes that flamed upon 
 the teacher through their tears, led her wounded 
 and bewildered brother from the room, and the 
 rest followed, taking their most precious posses- 
 sions with them. Never, never, would they go 
 back to that old school again. Darius, for the 
 moment unrepentant, was nevertheless aghast at 
 his awful deed. He had ready none of the excuses 
 which others would make for him. He did not 
 know that breaking up a school was serious busi- 
 ness, and that he had quelled a riot. He had hit 
 a boy overhead with a stick, and even if he es- 
 caped prison he would have to give up teaching 
 and go away in disgrace. 
 
 He could make a full confession to the chairman 
 of the school board before he went. 
 
154 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 So with no delay he set forth on the two-mile 
 walk to Hopeton Center and to the general store 
 of Jacob Nickleby, self-conscious, and wondering 
 all the way whether each one whom he met was 
 informed of the scandal and aware of his impend- 
 ing disgrace. With breath shortened by his hasty 
 walk and by his inward disturbance he gave to 
 Jacob Nickleby, keen-eyed and silent, the whole 
 gloomy story. 
 
 Jacob made no haste to reply. He whittled a 
 stick ; he made a well-centered shot at the box of 
 saw-dust; he shifted his cud to the other cheek. 
 
 ''Wal," he said slowly, "ye done jest right." 
 
 '"What," said Darius, who could not believe his 
 ears. 
 
 **Ye done jest right; now go back and make 
 them young ones step around." Jacob was a 
 sound but not wasteful talker, and he terminated 
 the interview at this point. ''Cost me a gallon 
 of cider," he remarked to himself, "but I guess 
 it's wuth it." 
 
 The news from the school had reached Mr. 
 Carrill's before Darius came in, but he was com- 
 pelled to tell it all over — to the motherly Mrs. 
 Carrill, to the former school committeeman, to 
 Anna who was young enough to make it no secret 
 that she was for him, to Katy O'Brien who de- 
 clared that she would "give it" to her brother 
 Michael for being mixed up in the affair, and to 
 Roger. All manifestly rejoiced except Roger, 
 who, recently the natural enemy of all school 
 teachers but now somewhat reconciled to their 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 155 
 
 existence, thought it dignified to hide his satis- 
 faction. There was a chicken supper that night 
 with some of Mrs. Carrill's own special spiced 
 rhubarb and Katy O'Brien's Washington pie. As 
 the family warmed up in their talk Darius was 
 amazed to learn how complete was their knowl- 
 edge of the situation and of the actors. 
 
 ''That Randolph Robinson deserved all he got," 
 said Mrs. Carrill. ''Last winter he worried a real 
 nice teacher, who didn't have good discipline, 
 out of school." 
 
 "Well, he comes by it naturally," added Mr. 
 Carrill. "His father is an ugly customer. In 
 fact he is the only thing I am doubtful about; 
 he may try to make trouble. But don't you 
 worry, we'll stop him." 
 
 "There'll be some fun at the store tonight," was 
 Roger's contribution. And after supper both he 
 and his father went out. 
 
 When they came back they reported that Ran- 
 dolph was not hurt enough to mention, and 
 seemed proud of the bandage his mother had tied 
 around his head. The other boys had come into 
 the store and had taken the jokes on them as good 
 medicine. And there was no more question of 
 the propriety and timeliness of Darius' stroke 
 than if he had made a home run in the new game 
 of baseball. Darius wrote to his mother about it 
 all, and went to bed much happier than he had 
 expected. But he was still very doubtful whether 
 he would have any scholars in the morning. 
 
 Six inches of snow fell in the night, softening 
 
156 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 the coarse and ragged edges of the country-side 
 to sweet curves. And now the facets of the tiny 
 crystals glittered and sparkled and dazzled in the 
 brilliant morning sun. The smokey steam rose 
 straight from the chimneys and gradually van- 
 ished against the indigo sky. 
 
 As Darius approached the schoolhouse he could 
 see forms about the door. Some had come after 
 all. They seemed to be busy with some work. 
 Wonderful ! Four or five of the larger boys were 
 making a path from the steps of the school down 
 to the sidewalk. They grinned as the teacher 
 came up. The pupils were assembling with quiet 
 sociability. Randolph Robinson came in, un- 
 abashed, but very conscious of his cotton crown. 
 Darius dropped a book from the table and Ran- 
 dolph picked it up. There was good stuff in Ran- 
 dolph, and if he had been a little older and en- 
 gaged in a righteous cause it would have taken 
 more than a cracked head to tame him. But the 
 store had been heard from; and also Daddy Rob- 
 inson who cherished a concealed ambition to make 
 a man of Randolph. His surprising comment 
 upon the collision of Darius' ruler with Ran- 
 dolph's head was, ''If the teacher can't lick my 
 boy I'll come in school and help him." Even the 
 big sixteen-year-old girls, who had called the 
 teacher a brute only a few hours before, smilingly 
 said, ''Good morning" as they replaced in their 
 desks pencils, sponges and little bottles of water, 
 the use of which upon their slates was considered 
 more elegant than spitting. 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 157 
 
 The school had decided to behave properly. 
 
 As soon as the teacher had shown signs of 
 vigor the parents had said something to their 
 children. And the children with a new point of 
 view had thought they might like the teacher 
 after all. Intentional insubordination and 
 malicious tricks ceased, though youthful impulses 
 did not lose their freshness. Darius had no oc- 
 casion to strike another blow during the remain- 
 ing ten weeks of school. 
 
 So in cheerful humor he could join in the 
 sprightly social life of the little village. 
 
 Before long the pond was cleared for skating, 
 and this gave Darius the chance to put his best 
 foot foremost. He skated impartially with his 
 own girls, big and little, and with Anna's high 
 school friends; and between times showed off a 
 trifle with the outer edge forward and backward, 
 the figure eight, and the single and double grape- 
 vine; and when the boys chose up for shinney 
 Darius' name led all the rest. On the bright 
 nights Roger Carrill pulled out the double-runner 
 which carried eight if rightly loaded — and bash- 
 fulness was not allowed — to dash down one-mile 
 hill with breathless speed and harmless hazards, 
 though occasional squeal-marked overturns dis- 
 closed white garments in the light of the moon. 
 And afterwards doughnuts, popcorn and cider by 
 the open fire. 
 
 And though Darius was no singer, unless he 
 was in a crowd, they made him join the singing- 
 school on Saturday nights, because it was the 
 
158 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 great social event of the week for young and old. 
 They chatted while the vacant places filled, until 
 the ''conductor," who was choir-master too, 
 tapped on his music stand with the gutta percha 
 wand. Then through their faith in him there 
 came a breath of inspiration; for he had the 
 artist's soul though he was an operative in the 
 shoe-peg factory by day. He bit his little tuning- 
 fork, — um, um, um, do, do, — everybody sound 
 
 — louder, louder, — that's better — now take 
 your parts, do, mi, sol — page thirteen, sing by 
 note — sol, sol, do, do, sol, sol, do, do, — all ready, 
 one, two, three, sing — Scotland's burning Scot- 
 land's burning ; loo kout, loo kout ; fi-er, fi-er, fi-er, 
 fi-er; pour on water, pour on water. Why, how 
 well it went! And all mixed up too. And after 
 the laugh was over they did it again, so loud this 
 time that the fire brigade would have been out 
 with the old tub if nearly all its members had not 
 been singing and laughing themselves. When 
 they had all cleared their throats and maybe slip- 
 ped in a bit of lozenger they tackled those hearty 
 old fugueing tunes : Bridgewater, Rainbow, 
 Victory, Fly like a youthful hart or roe. Over the 
 hills where spices (some said spiders) grow; then 
 a minor. How vain are all things here below. How 
 false and yet how fair ! — Dr. Watts took such a 
 gloomy view of life just because of a jilting girl. 
 
 — And by and by they paired off and went home, 
 and said good-night on the door-step in the good 
 old proper way. 
 
 Darius found the evening parties, which were 
 
Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 159 
 
 numerous after the establishment of law and 
 order, pleasant but precarious. He soon learned 
 to name an apple shrewdly for "One I love; two 
 I love ; three I love I say ; four I love with all my 
 heart; and five I cast away—" He could throw 
 the long apple paring over his left shoulder, and 
 let someone else who was always ready tell the 
 letter. No one could catch him in philopena, 
 *'yes or no," or ''give or take," unless he thought 
 it good judgment to be caught. But the kissing 
 games called for cautious diplomacy. In ''Clap 
 in and clap out" he could generally involve some 
 harmless little miss. But in Copenhagen it 
 seemed as though the large girls were too easily 
 caught; and when in Post Office, "Three letters 
 for Mr. Newman" was called out it made him 
 blush. Most of the big girls of his school were 
 present, and it seemed indiscreet to be kissing 
 them at parties when he might have to point out 
 errors in their spelling the next day. But the 
 local etiquette supported him, and no one minded 
 if the kisses were distributed fairly. Here in 
 West Hopeton, as in many places not so rural, 
 there was "pairing off" from twelve years old and 
 upwards; and every one knew that Jane "went 
 with" John and Bess with Bill, and to interfere 
 with any pair was cause of bitterness. But 
 Darius was the lad that on these occasions put 
 the prude into prudence and so carefully dispersed 
 his favors that if any girl had been omitted her 
 steady company wondered what was the matter 
 with her, until her turn came round. 
 
160 Dartmouth Book of Remembrance 
 
 So the winter quickly passed. 
 
 On the last day when the Exhibition came off 
 the scholars all sat ''in position" and sang 
 ''Lightly Row," "Home Again," "The Swanee 
 Ribber," and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," 
 which was very new then. The minister made a 
 prayer. The boys declaimed real pieces; the girls 
 read compositions from blue-ribboned manu- 
 scripts. All the scholars united to present their 
 teacher with beautiful boxes to hold his collars 
 and detachable cuffs. The big girls shyly pre- 
 sented their autograph albums for Darius' name 
 and "something nice." And Millie Randolph and 
 some of the other little girls shed a tear or two 
 of real sorrow at the parting. 
 
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