mother fashioned were swimming in
fragrant juice, where the shells of the clams for the chowder were snow
white and the chowder itself a triumph; where there were no voices but
those of the wind and sea; no--"

"Don't!" busts out Jonadab. "Don't! I can't stand it!"

He was mopping his eyes with his red bandanner. I was consider'ble shook
up myself. The dear land knows we was more used to huckleberry pies and
clam chowder than we was to liveried servants and costly dishes, but
there was something in the way that feller read off that slush that just
worked the pump handle. A hog would have cried; I know _I_ couldn't help
it. As for Peter T. Brown, he fairly crowed.

"It gets you!" he says. "I knew it would. And it'll get a heap of
others, too. Well, we can't send 'em back to the old home, but we can
trot the old home to them, or a mighty good imitation of it. Here it is;
right here!"

And he waves his hand up toward Aunt Sophrony's cast-off palace.

Cap'n Jonadab set up straight and sputtered like a firecracker. A man
hates to be fooled.

"Old home!" he snorts. "Old county jail, you mean!"

And then that Brown feller took his feet down off the rail, hitched his
chair right in front of Jonadab and me and commenced to talk. And HOW
he did talk! Say, he could talk a Hyannis fisherman into a missionary.
I wish I could remember all he said; 'twould make a book as big as a
dictionary, but 'twould be worth the trouble of writing it down. 'Fore
he got through he talked a thousand dollars out of Cap'n Jonadab, and it
takes a pretty hefty lecture to squeeze a quarter out of HIM. To make a
long yarn short, this was his plan:

He proposed to turn Aunt Sophrony's wind plantation into a hotel for
summer boarders. And it wan't going to be any worn-out, regulation kind
of a summer hotel neither.

"Confound it, man!" he says, "they're sick of hot and cold water,
elevators, bell wires with a nigger on the end, and all that. There's a
raft of old codgers that call themselves 'self-made men'--meanin'
that the Creator won't own 'em, and they take the responsibility
themselves--that are always wishing they could go somewheres like the
shacks where they lived when they were kids. They're always talking
about it, and wishing they could go to the old home and rest. Rest! Why,
say, there's as much rest to this place as there is sand, and there's
enough of that to scour all the knives in creation."

"But 'twill cost so like the dickens