Next day he was the happiest thing in sight, and when Miss Dillaway and
the count went Lover's Nesting he didn't seem to care a bit. All of
a sudden he told Jonadab and me that he was going up to Boston that
evening on bus'ness and wouldn't be back for a day or so. He wouldn't
tell what the bus'ness was, either, but just whistled and laughed and
sung, "Good-by, Susannah; don't you grieve for me," till train time.

He was back again three nights afterward, and he come right out to the
barn without going nigh the house. He had another feller with him, a
kind of shabby dressed Italian man with curly hair.

"Fellers," he says to me and Jonadab, "this is my friend, Mr. Macaroni;
he's going to engineer the barber shop for a while."

Well, we'd just let our other barber go, so we didn't think anything of
this, but when he said that his friend Spaghetti was going to stay in
the barn for a day or so, and that we needn't mention that he was there,
we thought that was funny.

But Peter done a lot of funny things the next day. One of 'em was to set
a feller painting a side of the house by the count's window, that didn't
need painting at all. And when the feller quit for the night, Brown told
him to leave the ladder where 'twas.

That evening the same crowd was together in the setting room. Peter was
as lively as a cricket, talking, talking, all the time. By and by he
says:

"Oh, say, I want you to see the new barber. He can shave anything from
a note to a porkypine. Come in here, Chianti!" he says, opening the door