It is strange that when a thing happens once, it forthwith happens twice or even more. For years no member of the "old gang" had come in touch with Mr. Sims. Yet the visit of Tommy Vidal was followed at no great distance of time by the "blowing in" of Ned Purvis.

"Well, well!" said Mr. Sims, as he opened one afternoon a telegram that the deferential waiter brought upon a tray. "This beats all! Old Ned Purvis wires that he's, going to blow in to town to-night at seven."

Forthwith Mr. Sims fell to ordering dinner for the three of us in a private room, with enough of an assortment of gin cocktails and Scotch highballs to run a distillery, and enough Vichy water and imported soda for a bath. "I know old Ned!" he said as he added item after item to the list.

At seven o'clock the waiter whispered, as in deep confidence, that there was a gentleman below for Mr. Sims.

It so happened that on that evening my friend's foot was in bad shape, and rested on a chair. At his request I went from the lounge room of the club downstairs to welcome the new arrival.

Purvis I knew all about. My friend had spoken of him a thousand times. He had played half-back on the football team—a big hulking brute of a fellow. In fact, he was, as pictured by Mr. Sims, a perfect colossus. And he played football—as did all Mr. Sims's college chums—"plastered." "Old Ned," so Mr. Sims would relate, "was pretty well 'soused' when the game started: but we put a hose at him at half-time and got him into pretty good shape." All men in any keen athletic contest, as remembered by Mr. Sims, were pretty well "tanked up." For the lighter, nimbler games such as tennis, they were reported "spifflocated" and in that shape performed prodigies of agility.

"You'll know Ned," said Mr. Sims, "by his big shoulders." I went downstairs.

The reception room below was empty, except for one man, a little, gentle-looking man with spectacles. He wore black clothes with a waistcoat reaching to the throat, a white tie and a collar buttoned on backwards. Ned Purvis was a clergyman! His great hulking shoulders had gone the way of all my good friend's reminiscences.

I brought him upstairs.

For a moment, in the half light of the room, Mr. Sims was still deceived.

"Well, Ned!" he began heartily, with a struggle to rise from his chair—then he saw the collar and tie of the Rev. Mr. Purvis, and the full horror of the thing dawned upon him. Nor did the three gin cocktails, which Mr. Sims had had stationed ready for the reunion, greatly help its geniality. Yet it had been a maxim, in the recollections of Mr. Sims, that when any of the boys blew in anywhere the bringing of drinks must be instantaneous and uproarious.

Our dinner that night was very quiet.

Mr. Purvis drank only water. That, with a little salad, made his meal. He had a meeting to address that evening at eight, a meeting of women—"dear women" he called them—who had recently affiliated their society with the work that some of the dear women in Mr. Purvis's own town were carrying on. The work, as described, boded no good for breweries. Mr. Purvis's wife, so it seemed, was with him and would also "take the platform."

As best we could we made conversation.

"I didn't know that you were married," said Mr. Sims.

"Yes," said Mr. Purvis, "married, and with five dear boys and three dear girls." The eight of them, he told us, were a great blessing. So, too, was his wife—a great social worker, it seemed, in the cause of women's rights and a marvellous platform speaker in the temperance crusade.

"By the way, Mr. Sims," said Mr. Purvis (they had called one another "Mr." after the first five minutes), "you may remember my wife. I think perhaps you knew her in our college days. She was a Miss Dashaway."

Mr. Sims bowed his head over his plate, as another of his lost illusions vanished into thin air.

After Mr. Purvis had gone, my friend spoke out his mind—once and once only, and more in regret than anger.

"I'm afraid," he said, "that old Ned has turned into a SISSY."

It was only to be expected that the visits of later friends—the "boys" who happened to "blow in"—were disappointments. Art Hamilton, who came next, and who had been one of the most brilliant men of the Class of '86 had turned somehow into a "complete mutt." Jake Todd, who used to write so brilliantly in the college paper, as recollected by Mr. Sims, was now the editor of a big New York daily. Good things might have been expected of him, but it transpired that he had undergone "wizening of the brain." In fact, a number of Mr. Sims's former friends had suffered from this cruel disease, consisting apparently of a shrinkage or contraction of the cerebellum.

Mr. Sims spoke little of his disappointments. But I knew that he thought much about them. They set him wondering. There were changes here that to the thoughtful mind called for investigation.

So I was not surprised when he informed me that it was his intention to visit "the old place" and have a look at it. The "old place," called also the "old shop," indicated, as I knew, Mr. Sims's college, the original scene of the exploits of the old gang. In the thirty years since he had graduated, though separated from it only by two hundred miles, Mr. Sims had never revisited it. So is it always with the most faithful of the sons of learning. The illumination of the inner eye is better than the crude light of reality. College reunions are but for the noisy lip service of the shallow and the interested. The deeper affection glows in the absent heart.

My friend invited me to "come along." We would, he said, "blow in" upon the place and have a look at it.

It was in the fullness of the spring time that we went, when the leaves are out on the college campus, and when Commencement draws near, and when all the college, even the students, are busy.

Mr. Sims, I noted when I joined him at the train, was dressed as for the occasion. He wore a round straw hat with a coloured ribbon, and light grey suit, and a necktie with the garish colours of the college itself. Thus dressed, he leaned as lightly as his foot allowed him upon a yellow stick, and dreamed himself again an undergraduate.

I had thought the purpose of his visit a mere curiosity bred in his disappointment. It appeared that I was wrong. On the train Mr. Sims unfolded to me that his idea in "blowing in" upon his college was one of benefaction. He had it in his mind, he said, to do something for the "old place," no less a thing than to endow a chair. He explained to me, modestly as was his wont, the origin of his idea. The brewing business, it appeared, was rapidly reaching a stage when it would have to be wound up. The movement of prohibition would necessitate, said Mr. Sims, the closing of the plant. The prospect, in the financial sense, occasioned my friend but little excitement. I was given to understand that prohibition, in the case of Mr. Sims's brewery, had long since been "written off" or "written up" or at least written somewhere where it didn't matter. And the movement itself Mr. Sims does not regard as permanent. Prohibition, he says, is bound to be washed out by a "turn of the tide"; in fact, he speaks of this returning wave of moral regeneration much as Martin Luther might have spoken of the Protestant Reformation. But for the time being the brewery will close. Mr. Sims had thought deeply, it seemed, about putting his surplus funds into the manufacture of commercial alcohol, itself a noble profession. For some time his mind has wavered between that and endowing a chair of philosophy. There is, and always has been, a sort of natural connection between the drinking of beer and deep quiet thought. Mr. Sims, as a brewer, felt that philosophy was the proper thing.

We left the train, walked through the little town and entered the university gates.

"Gee!" said Mr. Sims, pausing a moment and leaning on his stick, "were the gates only as big as that?"

We began to walk up the avenue.

"I thought there were more trees to it than these," said Mr. Sims.

"Yes," I answered. "You often said that the avenue was a quarter of a mile long."

"So the thing used to be," he murmured.

Then Mr. Sims looked at the campus. "A dinky looking little spot," he said.

"Didn't you say," I asked, "that the Arts Building was built of white marble?"

"Always thought it was," he answered. "Looks like rough cast from here, doesn't it."

"We'll have to go in and see the President, I suppose," continued Mr. Sims. He said it with regret. Something of his undergraduate soul had returned to his body. Although he had never seen the President (this one) in his life, and had only read of his appointment some five years before in the newspapers, Mr. Sims was afraid of him.

"Now, I tell you," he went on. "We'll just make a break in and then a quick get-away. Don't let's get anchored in there, see? If the old fellow gets talking, he'll go on for ever. I remember the way it used to be when a fellow had to go in to see Prexy in my time. The old guy would start mooning away and quoting Latin and keep us there half the morning."

At this moment two shabby-looking, insignificant men who had evidently come out from one of the buildings, passed us on the sidewalk.

"I wonder who those guys are," said Mr. Sims. "Look like bums, don't they?"

I shook my head. Some instinct told me that they were professors. But I didn't say so.

My friend continued his instructions.

"When the President asks us to lunch," he said, "I'll say that we're lunching with a friend down town, see? Then we'll make a break and get out. If he says he wants to introduce us to the Faculty or anything like that, then you say that we have to get the twelve-thirty to New York, see? I'm not going to say anything about a chair in philosophy to-day. I want to read it up first some night so as to be able to talk about it."

To all of this I agreed.

From a janitor we inquired where to find the President.

"In the Administration Building, eh?" said Mr. Sims. "That's a new one on me. The building on the right, eh? Thank you."

"See the President?" said a young lady in an ante-office. "I'm not sure whether you can see him just now. Have you an appointment?"

Mr. Sims drew out a card. "Give him that" he said. On the card he had scribbled "Graduate of 1887."

In a few minutes we were shown into another room where there was a young man, evidently the President's secretary, and a number of people waiting.

"Will you kindly sit down," murmured the young man, in a consulting-room voice, "and wait? The President is engaged just now."

We waited. Through the inner door leading to the President people went and came. Mr. Sims, speaking in whispers, continued to caution me on the quickness of our get-away.

Presently the young man touched him on the shoulder.

"The President will see you now," he whispered.

We entered the room. The "old guy" rose to meet us, Mr. Sims's card in his hand. But he was not old. He was at least ten years younger than either of us. He was, in fact, what Mr. Sims and I would almost have called a boy. In dress and manner he looked as spruce and busy as the sales manager of a shoe factory.

"Delighted to see you, gentlemen," he said, shaking hands effusively. "We are always pleased to see our old graduates, Mr. Samson—No, I beg pardon, Mr. Sims—class of '97, I see—No, I beg your pardon, Class of '67, I read it wrongly—"

I heard Mr. Sims murmuring something that seemed to contain the words "a look around."

"Yes, yes, exactly," said the President. "A look round, you'll find a great deal to interest you in looking about the place, I'm sure, Mr. Samson, great changes. I'm extremely sorry I can't offer to take you round myself," here he snapped a gold watch open and shut, "the truth is I have to catch the twelve-thirty to New York—so sorry."

Then he shook our hands again, very warmly.

In another moment we were outside the door. The get-away was accomplished.

We walked out of the building and towards the avenue.

As we passed the portals of the Arts Building, a noisy, rackety crowd of boys—evidently, to our eyes, schoolboys —came out, jostling and shouting. They swarmed past us, accidentally, no doubt, body-checking Mr. Sims, whose straw hat was knocked off and rolled on the sidewalk. A janitor picked it up for him as the crowd of boys passed.

"What pack of young bums are those?" asked Mr. Sims. "You oughtn't to let young roughs like that come into the buildings. Are they here from some school or something?"

"No sir," said the janitor. "They're students."

"Students?" repeated Mr. Sims. "And what are they shouting like that for?"

"There's a notice up that their professor is ill, and so the class is cancelled, sir."

"Class!" said Mr. Sims. "Are those a class?"

"Yes, sir," said the janitor. "That's the Senior Class in Philosophy."

Mr. Sims said nothing. He seemed to limp more than his custom as we passed down the avenue.

On the way home on the train he talked much of crude alcohol and the possibilities of its commercial manufacture.

So far as I know, his only benefaction up to date has been the two dollars that he gave to a hackman to drive us away from the college.



6.—Fetching the Doctor: From Recollections of Childhood in the Canadian Countryside

We lived far back in the country, such as it used to be in Canada, before the days of telephones and motor cars, with long lonely roads and snake fences buried in deep snow, and with cedar swamps where the sleighs could hardly pass two abreast. Here and there, on a winter night, one saw the light in a farm house, distant and dim.

Over it all was a great silence such as people who live in the cities can never know.

And on us, as on the other families of that lonely countryside, there sometimes fell the sudden alarm of illness, and the hurrying drive through the snow at night to fetch the doctor from the village, seven miles away.

My elder brother and I—there was a long tribe of us, as with all country families—would hitch up the horse by the light of the stable lantern, eager with haste and sick with fear, counting the time till the doctor could be there.

Then out into the driving snow, urging the horse that knew by instinct that something was amiss, and so mile after mile, till we rounded the corner into the single street of the silent village.

Late, late at night it was—eleven o'clock, perhaps—and the village dark and deep in sleep, except where the light showed red against the blinds of the "Surgery" of the doctor's rough-cast house behind the spruce trees.

"Doctor," we cried, as we burst in, "hurry and come. Jim's ill—"

I can see him still as he sat there in his surgery, the burly doctor, rugged and strong for all the sixty winters that he carried. There he sat playing chess—always he seemed to be playing chess—with his son, a medical student, burly and rugged already as himself.

"Shut the door, shut the door!" he called. "Come in, boys; here, let me brush that snow off you—it's my move Charlie, remember—now, what the devil's the matter?"

Then we would pant out our hurried exclamations, both together.

"Bah!" he growled, "ill nothing! Mere belly ache, I guess."

That was his term, his favorite word, for an undiagnosed disease—"belly ache." They call it supergastral aesthesia now. In a city house, it sounds better. Yet how we hung upon the doctor's good old Saxon term, yearning and hoping that it might be that.

But even as he growled the doctor had taken down a lantern from a hook, thrown on a huge, battered fur coat that doubled his size, and was putting medicines—a very shopful it seemed—into a leather case.

"Your horse is done up," he said. "We'll put my mare in. Come and give me a hand, Charlie."

He was his own hostler and stable-man, he and his burly son. Yet how quickly and quietly he moved, the lantern swinging on his arm, as he buckled the straps. "What kind of a damn fool tug is this you've got?" he would say.

Then, in a moment, as it seemed, out into the wind and snow again, the great figure of the doctor almost filling the seat of the cutter, the two of us crushed in beside him, with responsibility, the unbearable burden, gone from us, and renewed comfort in our hearts.

Little is said on the way: our heads are bent against the storm: the long stride of the doctor's mare eats up the flying road.

Then as we near the farm house and see the light in the sick-room window, fear clutches our hearts again.

"You boys unhitch," says the doctor. "I'll go right in."

Presently, when we enter the house, we find that he is in the sick-room—the door closed. No word of comfort has come forth. He has sent out for hot blankets. The stoves are to be kept burning. We must sit up. We may be needed. That is all.

And there in that still room through the long night, he fights single-handed against Death. Behind him is no human help, no consultation, no wisdom of the colleges to call in; only his own unaided strength, and his own firm purpose and that strange instinct in the fight for a flickering life, that some higher power than that of colleges has planted deep within his soul.

So we watch through the night hours, in dull misery and fear, a phantom at the window pane: so must we wait till the slow morning shows dim and pale at the windows.

Then he comes out from the room. His face is furrowed with the fatigue of his long vigil. But as he speaks the tone of his voice is as that of one who has fought and conquered.

"There—he'll do now. Give him this when he wakes."

Then a great joy sweeps over us as the phantom flees away, and we shudder back into the warm sunshine of life, while the sound of the doctor's retreating sleighbells makes music to our ears.

And once it was not so. The morning dawned and he did not come from the darkened room: only there came to our listening ears at times the sound of a sob or moan, and the doctor's voice, firm and low, but with all hope gone from it.

And when at last he came, his face seemed old and sad as we had never seen it. He paused a moment on the threshold and we heard him say, "I have done all that I can." Then he beckoned us into the darkened room, and, for the first time, we knew Death.

All that is forty years ago.

They tell me that, since then, the practice of medicine has been vastly improved. There are specialists now, I understand, for every conceivable illness and for every subdivision of it. If I fall ill, there is a whole battery of modern science to be turned upon me in a moment. There are X-rays ready to penetrate me in all directions. I may have any and every treatment—hypnotic, therapeutic or thaumaturgic—for which I am able to pay.

But, oh, my friends, when it shall come to be my lot to be ill and stricken—in the last and real sense, with the Great Fear upon me, and the Dark Phantom at the pane—then let some one go, fast and eager—though it be only in the paths of an expiring memory—fast and eager, through the driving snow to bring him to my bedside. Let me hear the sound of his hurrying sleighbells as he comes, and his strong voice without the door—and, if that may not be, then let me seem at least to feel the clasp of his firm hand to guide me without fear to the Land of Shadows, where he has gone before.

THE END