Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped Andrew Jackson’s portrait with crape, the rightful earl, wrote off the family bereavement to the usurper in England—­a letter which we have already read.  He also, by letter to the village authorities at Duffy’s Corners, Arkansas, gave order that the remains of the late twins be embalmed by some St. Louis expert and shipped at once to the usurper—­with bill.  Then he drafted out the Rossmore arms and motto on a great sheet of brown paper, and he and Hawkins took it to Hawkins’s Yankee furniture-mender and at the end of an hour came back with a couple of stunning hatchments, which they nailed up on the front of the house—­attractions calculated to draw, and they did; for it was mainly an idle and shiftless negro neighborhood, with plenty of ragged children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of interest like that, and keep on sparing them for it, days and days together.

The new earl found—­without surprise—­this society item in the evening paper, and cut it out and scrapbooked it: 

By a recent bereavement our esteemed fellow citizen, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, Perpetual Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body, succeeds, as rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore, third by order of precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will take early measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the title and estates from the present usurping holder of them.  Until the season of mourning is past, the usual Thursday evening receptions at Rossmore Towers will be discontinued.

Lady Rossmore’s comment-to herself: 

“Receptions!  People who don’t rightly know him may think he is commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw.  As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don’t exist, I reckon.  As like as not it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody else to name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but it just comes natural to him.  Well, no doubt it’s a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.  Uncle Dave Hopkins used to always say, ’Turn me into John Calvin, and I want to know which place I’m going to; turn me into Mulberry Sellers and I don’t care.’”

The rightful earl’s comment-to himself: 

“It’s a beautiful name, beautiful.  Pity I didn’t think of it before I wrote the usurper.  But I’ll be ready for him when he answers.”

CHAPTER V.

No answer to that telegram; no arriving daughter.  Yet nobody showed any uneasiness or seemed surprised; that is, nobody but Washington.  After three days of waiting, he asked Lady Rossmore what she supposed the trouble was.  She answered, tranquilly: 

“Oh, it’s some notion of hers, you never can tell.  She’s a Sellers, all through—­at least in some of her ways; and a Sellers can’t tell you beforehand what he’s going to do, because he don’t know himself till he’s done it.  She’s all right; no occasion to worry about her.  When she’s ready she’ll come or she’ll write, and you can’t tell which, till it’s happened.”