eck of trouble. His elephant costume had
all sorts of queer mishaps. He wanted to make it all himself, even to
the sewing, and he couldn't sew for sour apples, as Nora very readily
told him. Two small palm-leaf fans, fastened to an old cap of his
father's so that they flopped with every movement, served as the
elephant's ears, while out of an old brown coat sleeve Danny had
fashioned what passed for an elephant's trunk. He fastened it with a
string to the visor of the cap.

Danny was stuffing the leg of an old pair of blue trousers with straw,
flattening it out until it bore a faint resemblance to the paddle-shaped
tail of a beaver.

"What is that you're making?" Jerry asked.

"Why, that's the el'funt's tail!" said Danny. "Anybody could tell that."

He held it proudly up, displaying it in all its blue glory.

"El'funts' tails are small like a rope," Jerry remarked.

Danny laughed derisively. "Much you know about it! I guess a el'funt's
about the biggest animal in the world and it wouldn't have a little ole
tail like a rope."

"They are little, like a rope," Jerry insisted.

"How do you know they are?" asked Danny. "Just tell me how you know
anything about it."

"I don't know, but I know," Jerry said, feeling all his obstinacy
aroused by Danny's air of conscious superiority.

"There, you just said you didn't know," Celia Jane interposed, going to
her elder brother's aid, as she always did in a dispute with Jerry.

"I didn't neither," asseverated Jerry.

"You said you didn't know," insisted Celia Jane.

"I don't know how I know," said Jerry, "but I know el'funts have little
tails--like a rope."

"Have you ever been to a circus?" asked Chris.

"Not that I remember."

"Have you ever seen a el'funt?" pursued Danny.

"N-n-no, but it kind of seems as if I almost had."

"I guess you'd know if you had seen a el'funt, wouldn't you?"

"Y-y-yes," responded Jerry doubtfully.

"Then if you ain't ever been to a circus or seen a el'funt, I guess you
don't know what you are talking about."

"El'funts' tails are little, like a rope," Jerry insisted.

"Like a cow's tail?" asked Celia Jane.

Jerry nodded assent. "Only they haven't so much hair on the end," he
added.

"A el'funt's a hundred times as big as a cow, I guess," interposed
Danny, "an' it wouldn't have a little tail like a cow. I guess I know
more about it than you do. I'm older, ain't I?"

"Yes," Jerry admitted, "but they are little."

Nora now i