I am of that habit of mind that makes me prone to listen.  And for this, perhaps, Mr. Sims selects me as the recipient of the stories of his college days.  It is, it seems, the fixed belief of my good friend that when he was young he belonged at college to a particularly nefarious crowd or group that exists in his mind under the name of the “old gang.”  The same association, or corporate body or whatever it should be called, is also designated by Mr. Sims, the “old crowd,” or more simply and affectionately “the boys.”  In the recollection of my good friend this “old gang” were of a devilishness since lost off the earth.  Work they wouldn’t.  Sleep they despised.  While indoors they played poker in a blue haze of tobacco smoke with beer in jugs and mugs all round them.  All night they were out of doors on the sidewalk with linked arms, singing songs in chorus and jeering at the city police.

Yet in spite of life such as this, which might appear to an outsider wearing to the intellect, the “old gang” as recollected by Mr. Sims were of a mental brilliancy that eclipses everything previous or subsequent.  McGregor of the Class of ’85 graduated with a gold medal in Philosophy after drinking twelve bottles of lager before sitting down to his final examination.  Ned Purvis, the football half-back, went straight from the football field after a hard game with his ankle out of joint, drank half a bottle of Bourbon Rye and then wrote an examination in Greek poetry that drew tears from the President of the college.

Mr. Sims is perhaps all the more prone to talk of these early days insomuch that, since his youth, life, in the mere material sense, has used him all too kindly.  At an early age, indeed at about the very time of his graduation, Mr. Sims came into money,—­not money in the large and frenzied sense of a speculative fortune, begetting care and breeding anxiety, but in the warm and comfortable inheritance of a family brewery, about as old and as well-established as the Constitution of the United States.  In this brewery, even to-day, Mr. Sims, I believe, spends a certain part, though no great part, of his time.  He is carried to it, I understand, in his limousine in the sunnier hours of the morning; for an hour or so each day he moves about among the warm smell of the barley and the quiet hum of the machinery murmuring among its dust.

There is, too, somewhere in the upper part of the city a huge, silent residence, where a noiseless butler adjusts Mr. Sims’s leg on a chair and serves him his dinner in isolated luxury.

But the residence, and the brewery, and with them the current of Mr. Sims’s life move of themselves.

Thus has care passed Mr. Sims by, leaving him stranded in a club chair with his heavy foot and stick beside him.