pped 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.

"They almost got a steam yacht on me last year," he went on. "Hired a
Vienna doctor to say I ought to be kept at sea between Gibraltar and the
Bosphorus. And here, by George, is America the dear, bully old America
of Washington, Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln! And they
want to keep me chasing around among ruins and tombs! I say to you, Mr.
Harwood, in all solemnity, that I've goo-gooed my last goo-goo at the
tombs of dead kings!"

They stood near the shop door during this interchange. Dan forgot, in
his increasing interest and mystification, that the "Courier's" city
editor was waiting for news of Thatcher, the capitalist. Young
Thatcher's narrative partook of the nature of a protest. He was
seriously in rebellion against his own expatria