The Grand Old Man of our undergraduate days at New Haven, now some time past, was the great Dr. Henry Augustin Beers, a venerable gaffer who had, in his younger days, been the companion of Matthew Arnold, and even in his retirement was a tall tower of erudition and a Connecticut Yankee eccentric of raffish habits and outspoken contempt for a degenerate generation, particularly as it was represented by the politics of prohibition.
“Young man,” he would bellow at enchanted undergraduates who had the honor of his acquaintance, “we are governed by the quintessence of corruption and poltroonery. Fetch me that decanter on the side table, as I am faint when I think of the evil days upon which we are come. Pour yourself a dollop to the damnation of demagogues, and give me a double.”
The old gentleman was far advanced in years and confined to a rolling chair, which made his consumption of neat tumblers of Lawrence's Medford rum a heroic gesture in our eyes.
“Don't let my dotter hear me,” he would continue in a voice which could be heard right across York Square and as far as Arthur Head's bookshop in Whalley Avenue, “but in the back of that closet you'll find some smokes fit for a man. She'll scalp me if she catches me, but if we open the windows she will never know.”
The fit smokes were a cask of Java rat-tail twists approximately ten inches long, with a tuft at the end for convenience of lighting what may have been based on tobacco and certainly had been in the house since Timothy Dwight was president of Yale down the street. They burned with a clear blue flame and a hissing noise like a blasting fuse, and the smoker had to be fairly adroit at dispensing of them once they were in combustion, or he could be painfully burned.
The delusion that the room would air in a few minutes was confined to Dr. Beers alone, God light a good man, as their odor must have impregnated the house for a month, but the picture of the scholarly ancient, waving aloft the afghan which should have been across his legs in an effort to clear the air of Java rattail, will linger forever.
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