There was one old chap that we’ll call Dillaway—­Ebenezer Dillaway.  That wan’t his name; his real one’s too well known to tell.  He runs the “Dillaway Combination Stores” that are all over the country.  In them stores you can buy anything and buy it cheap—­ cheapness is Ebenezer’s stronghold and job lots is his sheet anchor.  He’ll sell you a mowing machine and the grass seed to grow the hay to cut with it.  He’ll sell you a suit of clothes for two dollars and a quarter, and for ten cents more he’ll sell you glue enough to stick it together again after you’ve worn it out in the rain.  He’ll sell you anything, and he’s got cash enough to sink a ship.

He come to the “Old Home House” with his daughter, and he took to the place right away.  Said ’twas for all the world like where he used to live when he was a boy.  He liked the grub and he liked the cornhusks and he liked Brown.  Brown had a way of stealing a thing and yet paying enough for it to square the law—­that hit Ebenezer where he lived.

His daughter liked Brown, too, and ’twas easy enough to see that Brown liked her.  She was a mighty pretty girl, the kind Peter called a “queen,” and the active manager took to her like a cat to a fish.  They was together more’n half the time, gitting up sailing parties, or playing croquet, or setting up on the “Lover’s Nest,” which was a kind of slab summer-house Brown had rigged up on the bluff where Aunt Sophrony’s pig-pens used to be in the old days.

Me and Jonadab see how things was going, and we’d look at one another and wink and shake our heads when the pair’d go by together.  But all that was afore the count come aboard.

We got our first letter from the count about the third of June.  The writing was all over the plate like a biled dinner, and the English looked like it had been shook up in a bag, but it was signed with a nine fathom, toggle-jinted name that would give a pollparrot the lockjaw, and had the word “Count” on the bow of it.

You never see a feller happier than Peter T. Brown.

“Can he have rooms?” says Peter.  “Can he?  Well, I should rise to elocute!  He can have the best there is if yours truly has to bunk in the coop with the gladsome Plymouth Rock.  That’s what!  He says he’s a count and he’ll be advertised as a count from this place to where rolls the Oregon.”

And he was, too.  The papers was full of how Count What’s-his-Name was hanging out at the “Old Home House,” and we got more letters from rich old women and pork-pickling money bags than you could shake a stick at.  If you want to catch the free and equal nabob of a glorious republic, bait up with a little nobility and you’ll have your salt wet in no time.  We had to rig up rooms in the carriage house, and me and Jonadab slept in the haymow.

The count himself hove in sight on June fifteenth.  He was a little, smoked Italian man with a pair of legs that would have been carried away in a gale, and a black mustache with waxed ends that you’d think would punch holes in the pillow case.  His talk was like his writing, only worse, but from the time his big trunk with the foreign labels was carried upstairs, he was skipper and all hands of the “Old Home House.”