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.