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Harvard wasn't so much different a century ago in judge from the diary of Jacob Rhuff Mott of the Class of 1832, who "slept over prayers, disliked the food, and rejoiced unduly when his professors "missed" lectures.
Published last week by the University. Press order the title of "Charleston Goes to Harvard," the diary was written when Mott was a 19-year-old Junior in the College in 1831.
The chief change between 1830 and 1940 seems to have been the tempo at which college life was lived. Mott walked when he took a trip to Boston, or else drove his velocipede. The only excitement which he seems to have had during his Junior year was when he raced his machine with the stage coach which was between Cambridge and Boston.
Hard is Get Up
Mott admits that his aceustoined time of "retiring to court the favors of Morphous" was 12 or 1 o'clock, and that he finds it "the most difficult thing to the world to rise at a proper built in the morning."
"I this morning slept over both prayers and breakfast," he records on one morning. "One advantage attended the omission of the latter, namely an appetite at dinner sufficient to relish Commons beef."
On a few evenings, he boasts of "perpetrating his lesson in Electricity" but to balance these conscientious evenings, he tells of several occasions when he got through Latin class only by a "squirt," which was nineteenth century jargon for a good guess in an unprepared recitation.
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