like a biled dinner, and the English
looked like it had been shook up in a bag, but it was signed with a nine
fathom, toggle-jinted name that would give a pollparrot the lockjaw, and
had the word "Count" on the bow of it.

You never see a feller happier than Peter T. Brown.

"Can he have rooms?" says Peter. "CAN he? Well, I should rise to
elocute! He can have the best there is if yours truly has to bunk in the
coop with the gladsome Plymouth Rock. That's what! He says he's a count
and he'll be advertised as a count from this place to where rolls the
Oregon."

And he was, too. The papers was full of how Count What's-his-Name was
hanging out at the "Old Home House," and we got more letters from rich
old women and pork-pickling money bags than you could shake a stick at.
If you want to catch the free and equal nabob of a glorious republic,
bait up with a little nobility and you'll have your salt wet in no time.
We had to rig up rooms in the carriage house, and me and Jonadab slept
in the haymow.

The count himself hove in sight on June fifteenth. He was a little,
smoked Italian man with a pair of legs that would have been carried away
in a gale, and a black mustache with waxed ends that you'd think would
punch holes in the pillow case. His talk was like his writing, only
worse, but from the time his big trunk with the foreign labels was
carried upstairs, he was skipper and all hands of the "Old Home House."

And the funny part of it was that old man Dillaway was as much gone on
him as the rest. For a self-made American article he was the worst gone
on this machine-made importation that ever you see. I s'pose when you've
got more money than you can spend for straight goods you nat'rally go in
for buying curiosities; I can't see no other reason.

Anyway, from the minute the count come over the side it was "Good-by,
Peter." The foreigner was first oar with the old man and general consort
for the daughter. Whenever there was a sailing trip on or a spell of
roosting in the Lover's Nest, Ebenezer would see that the count looked
out for the "queen," while Brown stayed on the piazza and talked
bargains with papa. It worried Peter--you could see that. He'd set in
the barn with Jonadab and me, thinking, thinking, and all at once he'd
bust out:

"Bless that Dago's heart! I haven't chummed in with the degenerate
aristocracy much in my time, but somewhere or other I've seen that chap
before. Now where--where--where?"

For th