And sure enough, in a couple of days they bore down on the Thompsons, all sail set and colors flying.  They had a pair of plates that for ugliness and price knocked the “ginuwine Hall nappy” higher ’n the main truck.  And the way they crowed and bragged about their “finds” wa’n’t fit to put in the log.  The Dowager and “my daughter” left that dinner table trembling all over.

Well, you can see how a v’yage would end that commenced that way.  The Dowager and Barbara would scour the neighborhood and capture more prizes, and the Duchess and her tribe would get busy and go ’em one better.  That’s one sure p’int about the collecting business—­it’ll stir up a fight quicker’n anything I know of, except maybe a good looking bachelor minister.  The female Thompsons and Smalls was “my dear-in’” each other more’n ever, but there was a chill setting in round them piazza thrones, and some of the sarcastic remarks that was casually hove out by the bosom friends was pretty nigh sharp enough to shave with.  As for Milo and Eddie, they still smoked together behind the barn, but the atmosphere on the quarter-deck was affecting the fo’castle and there wa’n’t quite so many “old mans” and “dear boys” as there used to was.  There was a general white frost coming, and you didn’t need an Old Farmer’s Almanac to prove it.

The spell of weather developed sudden.  One evening me and Cap’n Jonadab and Peter T. was having a confab by the steps of the billiard-room, when Milo beats up from around the corner.  He was smiling as a basket of chips.

“Hello!” hails Peter T. cordial.  “You look as if you’d had money left you.  Any one else remembered in the will?” he says.

Milo laughed all over.  “Well, well,” says he, “I am feeling pretty good.  Made a ten-strike with Mrs. T. this afternoon for sure.

“That so?” says Peter.  “What’s up?  Hooked a prince?”

A friend of “my daughter’s” over at Newport had got engaged to a mandarin or a count or something ’nother, and the Dowager had been preaching kind of eloquent concerning the shortness of the nobility crop round Wellmouth.

“No,” says Milo, laughing again.  “Nothing like that.  But I have got hold of that antique davenport she’s been dying to capture.”

One of the boarders at the hotel over to Harniss had been out antiquing a week or so afore and had bagged a contraption which answered to the name of a “ginuwine Sheriton davenport.”  The dowager heard of it, and ever since she’d been remarking that some people had husbands who cared enough for their wives to find things that pleased ’em.  She wished she was lucky enough to have that kind of a man; but no, she had to depend on herself, and etcetery and so forth.  Maybe you’ve heard sermons similar.

So we was glad for Milo and said so.  Likewise we wanted to know where he found the davenport.

“Why, up here in the woods,” says Milo, “at the house of a queer old stick, name of Rogers.  I forget his front name—­’twas longer’n the davenport.”