Cambridge Sketches | Page 3

crew, walked to New
York during the Thanksgiving recess--six days in all.
The undergraduates had not yet become acquainted with tennis, the
most delightful of light exercises, and foot-ball had not yet been
regulated according to the rules of Rugby and Harrow. The last of the
pernicious foot-ball fights between Sophomores and Freshmen took
place in September, 1863, and commenced in quite a sanguinary
manner. A Sophomore named Wright knocked over Ellis, the captain of
the Freshman side, without reason or provocation, and was himself
immediately laid prostrate by a red-headed Scotch boy named Roderick
Dhu Coe, who seemed to have come to college for the purpose, for he
soon afterwards disappeared and was never seen there again. With the
help of Coe and a few similar spirits, the Freshmen won the game. It
was the first of President Hill's reforms to abolish this brutal and
unseemly custom.
The New York game of base-ball, which has since assumed such
mammoth proportions, was first introduced in our colleges by Wright
and Flagg, of the Class of '66; and the first game, which the Cambridge
ladies attended, was played on the Delta in May of that year with the
Trimountain Club of Boston. Flagg was the finest catcher in New
England at that time; and, although he was never chosen captain, he
was the most skillful manager of the game. It was he who invented the
double-play which can sometimes be accomplished by muffing a
fly-catch between the bases. He caught without mask or gloves and was
several times wounded by the ball.
Let us retrace the steps of time and take a look at the old Delta on a
bright June evening, when the shadows of the elms are lengthening
across the grass. There are from fifty to a hundred students, and

perhaps three or four professors, watching the Harvard nine practise in
preparation for its match with the formidable Lowell nine of Boston.
Who is that slender youth at second base,--with the long nose and
good-humored twinkle in his eye,--who never allows a ball to pass by
him? Will he ever become the Dean of the Harvard Law School? And
that tall, olive-complexioned fellow in the outfield, six feet two in his
ball-shoes,--who would suppose that he is destined to go to Congress
and serve his country as Minister to Spain! There is another dark-eyed
youth leaning against the fence and watching the ball as it passes to and
fro. Is he destined to become Governor of Massachusetts? And that
sturdy-looking first-baseman,--will he enter the ministry and preach
sermons in Appleton Chapel? These young men all live quiet, sensible
lives, and trouble themselves little concerning class honors and secret
societies. If they have a characteristic in common it is that they always
keep their mental balance and never go to extremes; but neither they
nor others have any suspicion of their several destinies. Could they
return and fill their former places on the ground, how strangely they
would feel! But the ground itself is gone; their youth is gone, and the
honors that have come to them seem less important than the welfare of
their families and kindred.
Misdemeanors, great and small, on the part of the students were more
common formerly than they have been in recent years, for the good
reason that the chances of detection were very much less. Some of the
practical jokes were of a much too serious character. The college Bible
was abstracted from the Chapel and sent to Yale; the communion wine
was stolen; a paper bombshell was exploded behind a curtain in the
Greek recitation-room; and Professor Pierce discovered one morning
that all his black-boards had been painted white. All the copies of
Cooke's Chemical Physics suddenly disappeared one afternoon, and
next morning the best scholars in the Junior Class were obliged to say,
"Not prepared."
A society called the Med. Fac. was chiefly responsible for these
performances; but so secret was it in its membership and proceedings
that neither the college faculty nor the great majority of the students
really knew whether there was such a society in existence or not. A
judge of the United States Circuit Court, who had belonged to it in his
time, was not aware that his own son was a member of it.

Some of the members of this society turned out well, and others badly;
but generally an inclination for such high pranks shows a levity of
nature that bodes ill for the future. A college class is a wonderful study
in human nature, from the time it enters until its members have arrived
at forty or fifty years of age. There was one young man at Harvard in
those days who was so evidently marked out by destiny for a great
public career that when