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.
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