INVALID’S TABLE.  At Yale College, in former times, a table at which those who were not in health could obtain more nutritious food than was supplied at the common board.  A graduate at that institution has referred to the subject in the annexed extract.  “It was extremely difficult to obtain permission to board out, and indeed impossible except in extreme cases:  the beginning of such permits would have been like the letting out of water.  To take away all pretext for it, an ‘invalid’s table’ was provided, where, if one chose to avail himself of it, having a doctor’s certificate that his health required it, he might have a somewhat different diet.”—­Scenes and Characters in College, New Haven, 1847, pp. 117, 118.

J.

JACK-KNIFE.  At Harvard College it has long been the custom for the ugliest member of the Senior Class to receive from his classmates a Jack-knife, as a reward or consolation for the plainness of his features.  In former times, it was transmitted from class to class, its possessor in the graduating class presenting it to the one who was deemed the ugliest in the class next below.

Mr. William Biglow, a member of the class of 1794, the recipient for that year of the Jack-knife,—­in an article under the head of “Omnium Gatherum,” published in the Federal Orrery, April 27, 1795, entitled, “A Will:  Being the last words of CHARLES CHATTERBOX, Esq., late worthy and much lamented member of the Laughing Club of Harvard University, who departed college life, June 21, 1794, in the twenty-first year of his age,”—­presents this transmittendum to his successor, with the following words:—­

 “Item.  C——­ P——­s[41] has my knife,
   During his natural college life;
   That knife, which ugliness inherits,
   And due to his superior merits,
   And when from Harvard he shall steer,
   I order him to leave it here,
   That’t may from class to class descend,
   Till time and ugliness shall end.”

Mr. Prentiss, in the autumn of 1795, soon after graduating, commenced the publication of the Rural Repository, at Leominster, Mass.  In one of the earliest numbers of this paper, following the example of Mr. Biglow, he published his will, which Mr. Paine, the editor of the Federal Orrery, immediately transferred to his columns with this introductory note:—­“Having, in the second number of ‘Omnium Gatherum’ presented to our readers the last will and testament of Charles Chatterbox, Esq., of witty memory, wherein the said Charles, now deceased, did lawfully bequeath to Ch——­s Pr——­s the celebrated ‘Ugly Knife,’ to be by him transmitted, at his college demise, to the next succeeding candidate; -------- and whereas the said Ch----s Pr----s, on the 21st of June last, departed his aforesaid college life, thereby leaving to the inheritance of his successor the valuable legacy which his illustrious friend had bequeathed, as an entailed estate, to the poets of