"There!" he snaps. "There 'tis, underneath you. Come on! Here! I'll unload you."
Maybe the passenger would have said somethin' else, but he didn't have a chance. Afore he could even think he was jerked out of that depot wagon and stood up on the ground.
"There!" says Simeon. "Now you're safe and no bones broken. Where do you want your dunnage; in the house?"
I don't know what answer he got. Afore I could hear it there was a gasp and a gurgle from Lot. I turned to him. He was leaning out of the window starin' down at the little man under the big hat.
"I believe—" he says, "I—I—why, it's Cousin Lemuel!"
Cousin Lemuel looked around him, at the house, at the woods, at the bay, at everything.
"Good heavens!" says he, in a sort of groan.—"Good heavens! what an awful place!"
That's how he made port and that was his first observation after landin'. He made consider'ble many more durin' the next few days, but the drift of 'em was all similar. He was a bird, Cousin Lemuel was. His twittery nerves had twittered so much durin' the past month or so that his doctors—he had seven or eight of 'em—had got tired of the chirrup, I cal'late, had held officers' counsel, and decided he must be got rid of somehow. They couldn't kill him, 'cause that was against the law, so they done the next best and ordered him to the seashore for a complete rest; at least, he said the rest was to be for him, but I judge 'twas the doctors that needed it most. He wouldn't go to a hotel—hotels were horrible,—but he happened to think of relation Lot down in South Ostable and headed for there. Whether or not Lot could take him in, or wanted to, didn't trouble him a mite! He wanted to come and that was sufficient! He never even took the trouble to write that he was comin'. When he once made up his mind to do a thing, and got sot on it, he was like the laws of the Medes and Possums—or whatever they was—in Scripture; you couldn't upset him in two thousand years. It got to be a "matter of principle" with him—he was always tellin' about his matters of principle—and when the "principle" complication struck, that settled it. Oh, Cousin Lemuel was a bird, just as I said.
And Lot, of course, didn't have gumption enough to say he wasn't welcome. No, indeed; fact is, Lot seemed to consider his comin' a sort of honor, as you might say. If that retired bug-collector had been the Queen of Sheba, he couldn't have had more fuss made over him. The schooner-load of trunks and satchels was carted aloft to the big room next to mine,—Lot's room 'twas, but Lot soared to the attic,—and Cousin Lemuel was carted there likewise. He was introduced to me, and about the first thing he said was, would I mind wearin' a dressin'-robe, or a bath-sack, or somethin' to cover up my game foot? the sight of the dreadful bandage affected his nerves. I was sort of shy on sacks and dolmans and such, but I done my best to please him with a patchwork comforter.
I can't begin to tell you the things he did, or had Lot do for him. Changin' the feather bed for a pumped-up air mattress he'd fetched along—air mattresses was a matter of principle with him—and firin' the rag mats off the floor of his room, 'cause the round-and-round braids made whirligigs in his head—and so on. But I sha'n't forget that first night in a hurry.