“Andover is not what it is cracked up to be,” he wrote to Kenneth. “Some of the fellows don’t know a gentleman when they see him. Think of their trying to make me a fag. Not much! I wish you were here to whale ’em.” After a few weeks the letters were more cheerful in tone. The boys had found out that he was somebody, and he had made the acquaintance of a real nice chap,—rich, too. He laid great stress on _rich_, as if that were the main thing in favor of Tom Haynes, who lived in Kentucky near where Harry’s father was born. “He has heard of the Morrises, and knows they are a tip-top family,” he wrote. “A little fast, maybe, as one of them once ran a bowie knife into somebody who called him a liar. But that’s nothing. That shows grit, Tom says, and he knows. We have a long vacation at Christmas and New Year’s, nearly two weeks, and Tom has hinted pretty broadly that he’d like to spend it with me at The 4 Corners. You see, I’ve done some tall bragging about _my house_, the Morris Place, and have spoken of Aunt Mary as the housekeeper, and so on. You know the blacks south are all uncles and aunts, and somehow Tom has got it into his head that Aunt Mary and Uncle Ephraim came from Kentucky with my father, and are like,—well, like his Aunt Dinah and Uncle Sam he talks so much about. I never meant him to think so, for I am not quite a cad; but when I saw that he had the idea, and that because of it he thought more of me and stood for me against the wretches who were going to toss me in a blanket I couldn’t tell him. How could I? He’d like to see the Morris Place, and says he’d have such fine times with sleigh rides and skating and eating Aunt Mary’s _pones_. I wonder what they are! I told him she made No. 1 fried cakes, but I never said a word about _pones_! He has a colored boy at home, who comes into his room every cold morning and makes a fire before he is up, and brushes his clothes and blacks his shoes. My eye! What would he think of that blizzardy north chamber, where we sleep and nearly shake the teeth out of our heads with the cold, as we dress and hurry downstairs to wash in a tin basin and wipe on a roller-towel! No, sir! I could not have him at the farmhouse, and so I had to make up some yarn about Aunt Mary’s having the rheumatism and Uncle Ephraim the gout, and nobody to do anything but a boy, Kenneth! And I honestly believe he thinks you black with the rest, although I never hinted such a thing. Why, you are as white as the driven snow compared to me, a liar and blackguard. But what was there left for me but to lie, and I can do that easy, you know,—that is, I can blarney a fellow till he don’t know whether he is himself or someone else. I blarneyed Tom till he wrote to his mother, who has invited me to spend the holidays at Cedar Bank, and I have accepted. Won’t it be jolly? And, by the way, I wish Uncle Ephraim would add a little to my allowance. Tom thinks me a kind of millionaire, and it won’t do to go empty-handed.