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.”
“Not Adoniram Rogers?” says Cap'n Jonadab, wondering.