So I sat on the hotel porch and watched to see what Kinderhook would do while Catty went back and wrote for catalogues. He got back in an hour and we sat there, waiting and watching, but it was ’most noon before Kinderhook came down. I guess he was a late sleeper and we heard that he had his breakfast served up in his room. It was the first time anybody in our town had ever done such a thing as that, except when they were sick, and there was a lot of talk about it. Most of us had read how dukes and earls and suchlike had their breakfasts brought to them in bed, and how they ate it while some kind of a servant in knee-pants put on their clothes for them. A good many folks said it marked Kinderhook as being real aristocratic, but Catty and I wouldn’t agree any with that; at least, not till we knew he had a servant with tight pants to dress him while he ate his porridge. And how a man was going to eat while another fellow was pulling his shirt over his head I couldn’t make out. Catty couldn’t, either. He said a man was as apt to get a mouthful of shirt in such circumstances as he was a mouthful of porridge. Probably they learn how to do it. It must be funny to watch, though, and I’d pay money to see it. Mr. Kinderhook came down about half past eleven and sat down to smoke a cigar about a foot long with a gold bellyband around it that was so shiny it glittered when the sun shone on it. He spoke to us like he always spoke to everybody he met—kind of oily-like and polite. “Good morning, my little men,” says he. “Why aren’t you playing marbles this fine morning?” That’s what he said! Just like that! Little men, says he, and marbles. Anybody knows boys don’t play marbles at that time of the year, and if I was big enough I’d lick anybody that called me “little man.” We had a Sunday-school superintendent once that always said that, and he was so unpopular that he quit being superintendent after a couple of weeks, on account of sitting down on a hornet that was tied in his chair with a piece of thread. It irritates a hornet to be tied with thread, and this one was about the maddest hornet you ever saw. He figured the superintendent was the one that tied him, I guess, but he wasn’t. I know who was, but I ain’t going to tell. But we didn’t say anything to Kinderhook about what we thought. Catty says good morning as polite as could be, and then he says: “We come to talk to you about buyin’ some churn stock, mister. You’re goin’ to make everybody rich, and we sort of figgered we’d like to be rich, too. Kin we buy some?” “If you’ve got the money,” says Mr. Kinderhook, and he winked at a man next to him.