“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!”

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.”