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“Cap’n Wixon?” he says to me, sticking out a gloved flipper.

“Not guilty,” says I. “There’s the skipper. My name’s Wingate.”

“Glad to have the pleasure, Mr. Wingate,” he says. “Cap’n Wixon, yours truly.”

We shook hands, and he took each of us by the arm and piloted us back to the piazza, like a tug with a couple of coal barges. He pulled up a chair, crossed his legs on the rail, reached into the for’ard hatch of his coat and brought out a cigar case.

“Smoke up,” he says. We done it–I holding my hat to shut off the wind, while Jonadab used up two cards of matches getting the first light. When we got the cigars to going finally, the feller says:

“My name’s Brown–Peter T. Brown. I read about your falling heir to this estate, Cap’n Wixon, in a New Bedford paper. I happened to be in New Bedford then, representing the John B. Wilkins Unparalleled All Star Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar- room Company. It isn’t my reg’lar line, the show bus’ness, but it produced the necessary ‘ham and’ every day and the excelsior sleep inviter every night, so–but never mind that. Soon as I read the paper I came right down to look at the property. Having rubbered, back I go to Orham to see you. Your handsome and talented daughter says you are over here. That’ll be about all–here I am. Now, then, listen to this.”

He went under his hatches again, rousted out a sheet of paper, unfolded it and read something like this–I know it by heart:

“The great sea leaps and splashes before you as it leaped and splashed in the old boyhood days. The sea wind sings to you as it sang of old. The old dreams come back to you, the dreams you dreamed as you slumbered upon the cornhusk mattress in the clean, sweet little chamber of the old home. Forgotten are the cares of business, the scramble for money, the ruthless hunt for fame. Here are perfect rest and perfect peace.

“Now what place would you say I was describing?” says the feller.

“Heaven,” says Jonadab, looking up, reverent like.

You never see a body more disgusted than Brown.

“Get out!” he snaps. “Do I look like the advance agent of Glory? Listen to this one.”

He unfurls another sheet of paper, and goes off on a tack about like this:

“The old home! You who sit in your luxurious apartments, attended by your liveried servants, eating the costly dishes that bring you dyspepsia and kindred evils, what would you give to go back once more to the simple, cleanly living of the old house in the country? The old home, where the nights were cool and refreshing, the sleep deep and sound; where the huckleberry pies that 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!”