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.”