“Of course, I believe you; but it’s odd the office didn’t know you were here.  They told me you and your mother and sisters were abroad, but that your father was in town.  A personal item in the ‘Courier’ this morning said that you were all in the Hartz Mountains.”

“I dare say it did!  The newspapers keep them all pretty well before the public.  But I’ve had enough junketing.  I’m going to stay right here for a while.”

“You prefer it here—­is that the idea?”

“Yes, I fancy I should if I knew it; I want to know it.  But I’m all kinds of crazy, you know.  They really think I’m clear off, simply because their kind of thing doesn’t amuse me.  I lost too much as a kid being away from home.  They said I had to be educated abroad, and there you see me—­Dresden awhile, Berlin another while, a lot of Geneva, and Paris for grand sprees.  And my lung was always the excuse if they wanted to do a winter on the Nile,—­ugh!  The very thought of Egypt makes me ill now.”

“It all sounds pretty grand to me.  I was never east of Boston in my life.”

“By Jove!  I congratulate you,” exclaimed the young man fervidly.  “And I’ll wager that you went to school at a cross-roads school-house and rode to town in a farm wagon to see a circus that had lions and elephants; and you probably chopped wood and broke colts and went swimming in an old swimmin’-hole and did all the other things you read about in American biographies and story books.  I can see it in your eye; and you talk like it, too.”

“I dare say I do!” laughed Dan.  “They’ve always told me that my voice sounds like a nutmeg grater.”

“They filed mine off!  Mother was quite strong for the Italian a, and I’m afraid I’ve caught it, just like a disease.”

“I should call it a pretty good case.  I was admiral of a canal boat in New Jersey one summer trying to earn enough money to carry my sophomore year in college, and cussing the mules ruined my hope of a reputable accent.  It almost spoiled my Hoosier dialect!”

“By George, I wonder if the canal-boat people would take me!  It would be less lonesome than working at the bench here.  Dad says I can do anything I like.  He’s tickled to death because I’ve come home.  He’s really the right sort; he did all the horny-handed business himself—­ploughed corn, wore red mittens to a red school-house, and got licked with a hickory stick.  But he doesn’t understand why I don’t either take a job in his office or gallop the Paris boulevards with mother and the girls; but he’s all right.  We’re great pals.  But the rest of them made a row because I came home.  For a while they had dad’s breweries as an excuse for keeping away, and my lungs!  Dad hid the breweries, so their hope of a villa at Sorrento is in my chest.  Dad says my lungs have been their main asset.  There’s really nothing the matter with me; the best man in New York told me so as I came through.”

His manner of speaking of his family was deliciously droll; he yielded his confidences as artlessly as a child.