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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 to furnish it,” I says.

“Furnish it!” says he. “Why, that’s just it! It won’t cost nothing to furnish it–nothing to speak of. I went through the house day before yesterday–crawled in the kitchen window–oh! it’s all right, you can count the spoons–and there’s eight of those bedrooms furnished just right, corded bedsteads, painted bureaus with glass knobs, ‘God Bless Our Home’ and Uncle Jeremiah’s coffin plate on the wall, rag mats on the floor, and all the rest. All she needs is a little more of the same stuff, that I can buy ’round here for next to nothing–I used to buy for an auction room–and a little paint and fixings, and there she is. All I want from you folks is a little money–I’ll chuck in two hundred and fifty myself–and you two can be proprietors and treasurers if you want to. But active manager and publicity man–that’s yours cheerily, Peter Theodosius Brown!” And he slapped his plaid vest.

Well, he talked all the forenoon and all the way to Orham on the train and most of that night. And when he heaved anchor, Jonadab had agreed to put up a thousand and I was in for five hundred and Peter contributed two hundred and fifty and experience and nerve. And the “Old Home House” was off the ways.

And by the first of May ’twas open and ready for business, too. You never see such a driver as that feller Brown was. He had a new wide piazza built all ’round the main buildings, painted everything up fine, hired the three best women cooks in Wellmouth–and there’s some good cooks on Cape Cod, too–and a half dozen chamber girls and waiters. He had some trouble getting corded beds and old bureaus for the empty rooms, but he got ’em finally. He bought the last bed of Beriah Burgess, up at East Harniss, and had quite a dicker getting it.

“He thought he ought to get five dollars for it,” says Brown, telling Jonadab and me about it. “Said he hated to part with it because his grandmother died in it. I told him I couldn’t see any good reason why I should pay more for a bed just because it had killed his grandmother, so we split up and called it three dollars. ‘Twas too much money, but we had to have it.”