And yet the Colonel often used it--when visitors were present--and seemed to get messages through it.

Mourning paper and a seal were ordered, then the friends took a rest.
Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped Andrew Jackson's portrait with crape, the rightful earl, wrote off the family bereavement to the usurper in England--a letter which we have already read.

He also, by letter to the village authorities at Duffy's Corners, Arkansas, gave order that the remains of the late twins be embalmed by some St.Louis expert and shipped at once to the usurper--with bill.

Then he drafted out the Rossmore arms and motto on a great sheet of brown paper, and he and Hawkins took it to Hawkins's Yankee furniture-mender and at the end of an hour came back with a couple of stunning hatchments, which they nailed up on the front of the house--attractions calculated to draw, and they did; for it was mainly an idle and shiftless negro neighborhood, with plenty of ragged children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of interest like that, and keep on sparing them for it, days and days together.
The new earl found--without surprise--this society item in the evening paper, and cut it out and scrapbooked it: By a recent bereavement our esteemed fellow citizen, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, Perpetual Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body, succeeds, as rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore, third by order of precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will take early measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the title and estates from the present usurping holder of them.

Until the season of mourning is past, the usual Thursday evening receptions at Rossmore Towers will be discontinued.
Lady Rossmore's comment-to herself: "Receptions! People who don't rightly know him may think he is commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw.
As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don't exist, I reckon.