The name is absent

American Colonial Colleges 275
wandered from Brandford to Killingworth and thence to
Saybrook, and up the river to Wethersfield, and down again
to Milford, before the Colony put up a building at New
Haven and so anchored it there. One year there were three
separate Yale commencements in three different towns ! Yet
in this distracted period, before the college even had a name,
there graduated from it a young man with the most pro-
found and original intellect of any colonial American—
Jonathan Edwards; and Edwards, after a life of single-
hearted devotion to philosophy and theology, died in office
as president of the fourth colonial college, at Princeton.

In addition to securing scholarships, Harvard revived,
and as far as America was concerned founded, the tradition
of student service. That had always existed in the English
university colleges, where “sizars” were a class of students
who went through on reduced fees in return for menial serv-
ice. Harvard, anticipating the trouble of later self-help
colleges in getting the boys to keep their rooms tidy, em-
ployed professional bedmakers; but several students re-
ceived grants for “wayting in the hall,” doing clerical work
for the President, ringing the college bell, and acting as col-
lege butler, which meant serving out the statutory half-pint
of beer and hunk of bread for breakfast.

At an early date, Harvard began to receive grants and
legacies of lands from which she was expected to collect the
rent. But in a new country, land was a drug on the market,
and few cared to be tenants when all could be landowners.
The fate of almost every college landgrant was to be
squatted upon by some stout frontiersman, who invited the
College Treasurer to “come and get it,” which he was sel-
dom in a position to do. With some urban parcels of real
estate the College was more fortunate, although Boston had
nothing like the “Queen’s farm” that King’s College was

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