“Only I do wish Mr. Daniels, OUR minister, might have a chance to preach over 'em, poor things!”
“So do I,” with a covert wink at Mrs. Bangs, who was a stanch adherent of the regular faith. “South America 'd be just the place for him; ain't that so, Keturah?”
He evaded all personal questions put to him by the boarders, explaining that he was renovating the old place just for fun—he always had had a gang of men working for him, and it seemed natural somehow. But to the friends of his boyhood, Asaph Tidditt and Bailey Bangs, he told the real truth.
“I swan to man!” exclaimed Bailey, almost tearfully, as the trio wandered through the rooms of the Cy Whittaker place, dodging paper hangers and plasterers; “I swan to man, Whit, if it don't almost seem as though I was a boy again. Why! it's your dad's house come back alive, it is so! Look at this settin' room! Seem's if I could see him now a-settin' by that ere stove, and Mrs. Whittaker, your ma, over there a-sewin', and old Cap'n Cy—your granddad—snoozin' in that big armchair—Why! why, whit! it's the very image of the chair he always set in!”
Captain Cy laughed aloud.
“It's more n' that, Bailey,” he said; “it's THE chair. 'Twas up attic, all busted and crippled, but I had it made over like new. And there's granddad's picture, lookin' just as I remember him—only he wan't quite so much of a frozen wax image as he's painted there. I'm goin' to hang it where it always hung, over the mantelpiece, next to the lookin' glass.
“Great land of love, boys!” he went on, “you fellers don't know what this means to me. Many and many's the time I've had this old house and this old room in my mind. I've seen 'em aboard ship in a howlin' gale off the Horn. I've seen 'em down in Surinam of a hot night, when there wan't a breath scurcely and the Caribs went around dressed in a handkerchief and a paper cigar, and it made you wish you could. I've seen 'em—but there! every time I've seen 'em I've swore that some day I'd come back and LIVE 'em, and now, by the big dipper! here I am. Oh, I tell you, chummies, you want to be fired OUT of a home and out of a town to appreciate 'em! Not that I blame the old man; he and I was too much alike to cruise in company. But Bayport I was born in, and in the Bayport graveyard they can plant me when I'm ready for the scrap heap. It's in the blood and—Why, see here! Don't I TALK like a Bayporter?”
“You sartin do!” replied Asaph emphatically.
“A body 'd think you'd been diggin' clams and pickin' cranberries in Bassett's Holler all your life long, to hear you.”
“You bet! Well, that's pride; that's what that is. I prided myself on hangin' to the Bayport twang through thick and thin. Among all the Spanish 'Carambas' and 'Madre de Dioses' it did me good to come out with a good old Yankee 'darn' once in a while. Kept me feelin' like a white man. Oh, I'm a Whittaker! I know it. And I've got all the Whittaker pig-headedness, I guess. And because the old man—bless his heart, I say now—told me I shouldn't BE a Whittaker no more, nor live like a Whittaker, I simply swore up and down I would be one and come back here, when I'd made my pile, to heave anchor and stay one till I die. Maybe that's foolishness, but it's me.”