On opening the papers left to his care, he found a request that his effects might be bestowed on his friend, the Goody, who had been so attentive to him during his declining hours.—Harvard Register, 1827-28, p. 86.
I was interrupted by a low knock at my door, followed by the entrance of our old Goody, with a bundle of musty papers in her hand, tied round with a soiled red ribbon.—Collegian, 1830, p. 231.
Were there any Goodies when you were in college, father? Perhaps you did not call them by that name. They are nice old ladies (not so very nice, either), who come in every morning, after we have been to prayers, and sweep the rooms, and make the beds, and do all that sort of work. However, they don't much like their title, I find; for I called one, the other day, Mrs. Goodie, thinking it was her real name, and she was as sulky as she could be.—Harvardiana, Vol. III. p. 76.
Yet these half-emptied bottles shall I take,
And, having purged them of this wicked stuff,
Make a small present unto Goody Bush.
Ibid., Vol. III. p. 257.
Reader! wert ever beset by a dun? ducked by the Goody from thine own window, when "creeping like snail unwillingly" to morning prayers?—Ibid., Vol. IV. p. 274.
The crowd delighted
Saw them, like Goodies, clothed in gowns of satin,
Of silk or cotton.—Childe Harvard, p. 26, 1848.
On the wall hangs a Horse-shoe I found in the street;
'T is the shoe that to-day sets in motion my feet;
Though its charms are all vanished this many a year,
And not even my Goody regards it with fear.
The Horse-Shoe, a Poem, by J.B. Felton, 1849, p. 4.
A very clever elegy on the death of Goody Morse, who "For forty years or more … contrived the while No little dust to raise" in the rooms of the students of Harvard College, is to be found in Harvardiana, Vol. I. p. 233. It was written by Mr. (afterwards Rev.) Benjamin Davis Winslow. In the poem which he read before his class in the University Chapel at Cambridge, July 14, 1835, he referred to her in these lines:
"'New brooms sweep clean': 't was thine, dear Goody Morse,
To prove the musty proverb hath no force,
Since fifty years to vanished centuries crept,
While thy old broom our cloisters duly swept.
All changed but thee! beneath thine aged eye
Whole generations came and flitted by,
Yet saw thee still in office;—e'en reform
Spared thee the pelting of its angry storm.
Rest to thy bones in yonder church-yard laid,
Where thy last bed the village sexton made!"—p. 19.
GORM. From gormandize. At Hamilton College, to eat voraciously.