Respecting the arrangement of the students at table, before referred to, Professor Sidney Willard remarks: "The intercourse among students at meals was not casual or promiscuous. Generally, the students of the same class formed themselves into messes, as they were called, consisting each of eight members; and the length of one table was sufficient to seat two messes. A mess was a voluntary association of those who liked each other's company; and each member had his own place. This arrangement was favorable for good order; and, where the members conducted themselves with propriety, their cheerful conversation, and even exuberant spirits and hilarity, if not too boisterous, were not unpleasant to that portion of the government who presided at the head table. But the arrangement afforded opportunities also for combining in factious plans and organizations, tending to disorders, which became infectious, and terminated unhappily for all concerned."--_Memories of Youth and Manhood_, Vol. II. pp. 192, 193. A writer in the New England Magazine, referring to the same period, says: "In commons, we fared as well as one half of us had been accustomed to at home. Our breakfast consisted of a good-sized biscuit of wheaten flour, with butter and coffee, chocolate, or milk, at our option. Our dinner was served up on dishes of pewter, and our drink, which was cider, in cans of the same material. For our suppers, we went with our bowls to the kitchen, and received our rations of milk, or chocolate, and bread, and returned with them to our rooms."--Vol. III. p. 239. Although much can be said in favor of the commons system, on account of its economy and its suitableness to health and study, yet these very circumstances which were its chief recommendation were the occasion also of all the odium which it had to encounter. "That simplicity," says Peirce, "which makes the fare cheap, and wholesome, and philosophical, renders it also unsatisfactory to dainty palates; and the occasional appearance of some unlucky meat, or other food, is a signal for a general outcry against the provisions." In the plain but emphatic words of one who was acquainted with the state of commons, as they once were at Harvard College, "the butter was sometimes so bad, that a farmer would not take it to grease his cart-wheels with." It was the usual practice of the Steward, when veal was cheap, to furnish it to the students three, four, and sometimes five times in the week; the same with reference to other meats when they could be bought at a low price, and especially with lamb. The students, after eating this latter kind of meat for five or six successive weeks would often assemble before the Steward's house, and, as if their natures had been changed by their diet, would bleat and blatter until he was fain to promise them a change of food, upon which they would separate until a recurrence of the same evil compelled them to the same measures.