Students Suffered From Poor Food During First Years of College--Faculty Was Deposed for Mismanagement

In these days when digestive disturbances may be quelled by a timely Bell-Ans, and the convalescent may air his gastronomic woes with a journalistic rattle of typewriter keys, it may be of interest to some to learn that the daily bread of the University was once a contributing cause of the appearance in court of the head of Harvard College.

The first Faculty of the College was Nathaniel Eaton. In his person, he embodied the President, Treasurer, Secretary, Dean, Bursar, Professor, Tutor, and Steward. With all the duties attached to these offices, the Faculty might have been excused a little neglect of one or two of them. But Mr. Eaton habitually neglected them all, and tyrannised over the tender College in each and all of his capacities. It may be seen that in his various positions he had ample opportunity for tyranny of a most complex and disagreeable nature.

But it was in the culinary department that his mis-management was most flagrant, and most felt. According to a contemporary account, the daily diet was mostly "porrige and pudding served without butter or suet." Mrs. Eaton, on whom her husband blamed the Squeersian board, admitted that "the flower was not so fine as it might nor so well boiled and stirred, and that the fish was bad." Pressed as to the presence in the menu of one of the most stable of foods-today, the lady said, "Beef, they never had it."

Mr. Eaton was finally brought to court, charged with mis-management of College affairs. But the respect for him as a man of learning was such that he might have been acquitted had not the student body appeared, and with them, Banquolike, the grisly spectre of indigestion that sat at every meal in the College. The Faculty was convicted, fined and deposed, and the Eatonian reputation of the eating at the University has yet to be dispelled.