of making men feel that he delighted in their society, that he wished for nothing better than to sit for hours in their company, content to listen to the arguments that raged about him.  Once in a while he would make a droll observation that was greeted with fits of laughter.  He was always referred to as “old Tom,” or “good old Tom”; presently, when he began to pick out chords on the banjo, it was discovered that he had a good tenor voice, though he could not always be induced to sing....  Somewhat to the jeopardy of the academic standard that my father expected me to sustain, our rooms became a rendezvous for many clubable souls whose maudlin, midnight attempts at harmony often set the cocks crowing.

       “Free from care and despair,
        What care we? 
       ’Tis wine, ’tis wine
        That makes the jollity.”

As a matter of truth, on these occasions it was more often beer; beer transported thither in Tom’s new valise,—­given him by his mother,—­and stuffed with snow to keep the bottles cold.  Sometimes Granite Face, adorned in a sky-blue wrapper, would suddenly appear in the doorway to declare that we were a disgrace to her respectable house:  the university authorities should be informed, etc., etc.  Poor woman, we were outrageously inconsiderate of her....  One evening as we came through the hall we caught a glimpse in the dimly lighted parlour of a young man holding a shy and pale little girl on his lap, Annie, Mrs. Bolton’s daughter:  on the face of our landlady was an expression I had never seen there, like a light.  I should scarcely have known her.  Tom and I paused at the foot of the stairs.  He clutched my arm.

“Darned if it wasn’t our friend Krebs!” he whispered.

While I was by no means so popular as Tom, I got along fairly well.  I had escaped from provincialism, from the obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business; new vistas, exciting and stimulating, had been opened up; nor did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends I made, but gave a hearty consent to a code I found congenial.  I recognized in the social system of undergraduate life at Harvard a reflection of that of a greater world where I hoped some day to shine; yet my ambition did not prey upon me.  Mere conformity, however, would not have taken me very far in a sphere from which I, in common with many others, desired not to be excluded....  One day, in an idle but inspired moment, I paraphrased a song from “Pinafore,” applying it to a college embroglio, and the brief and lively vogue it enjoyed was sufficient to indicate a future usefulness.  I had “found myself.”  This was in the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a sort of amateur, class poet-laureate.  Many were the skits I composed, and Tom sang them....

During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann Krebs, whistling merrily, on the stairs.

“Got your themes done?” he would inquire cheerfully.