ivener. "A sort of breeches buoy."

"I've heard of camel's-hair shawls but not of camel's-hair breeches!"
murmured Tutt. "I suppose if a camel wore pants--well, my imagination
refuses to contemplate the spectacle! Where's Willie?"

"He hasn't been in at all this morning!" said Miss Wiggin. "I'll
warrant--"

"What?" demanded Mr. Tutt suspiciously.

"--he's somewhere with that camel," she concluded.

* * * * *

Now, Miss Minerva, as her name connoted, was a wise woman; and she had
reached an unerring conclusion by two different and devious routes, to
wit, intuition and logic, the same being the high road and low road of
reason--high or low in either case as you may prefer. Thus logic:
Camel--small boy. Intuition: Small boy--camel. But there was here an
additional element--a direct personal relationship between this
particular small boy and this particular camel, rising out of the
incident of the ink bottle. She realized that that camel must have
acquired for William a peculiar quality--almost that of a possession--in
view of the fact that he had put his mark upon it. She knew that Willie
could no more stay away from the environs of that camel than said camel
could remain in that attic. Indeed we might go on at some length
expounding further this profound law of human nature that where there
are camels there will be small boys; that, as it were, under such
circumstances Nature abhors an infantile vacuum.

"If I know him, he is!" agreed Mr. Tutt, referring to William's probable
proximity to Eset el Gazzar.

"Speaking of camels," said Tutt as he lit a cigarette, "makes me think
of brass beds."

"Yes," nodded his partner. "Of course it would, naturally. What on earth
do you mean?"

"I mean this," began Tutt, clearing his throat as if he were addressing
twelve good and true men--"a camel is obviously an unusual--not to say
peculiar--animal to be roosting over there in that attic. It is an
exotic--if I may use that term. It is as exotic as a brass bed from
Connecticut would be, or is, in Damascus or Lebanon. Now, therefore, a
camel will as assuredly give cause for trouble in New York as a brass
bed in Bagdad!"

"The right thing often makes trouble if put in the wrong place,"
pondered Mr. Tutt.

"Or the wrong thing in the right place!" assented Tutt. "Now all these
unassimilated foreigners--"

"What have they got to do with brass beds in Lebanon?" challenged Miss
Wiggin.

"Why,"