“—­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,” continued Tutt, “I am credibly informed that the American brass bed—­particularly the double bed—­owing to its importation into Asia Minor was the direct cause of the Armenian massacres.”

“Tosh!” said Miss Wiggin.

“For a fact!” asserted Tutt.  “It’s this way—­an ambassador told me so himself—­the Turks, you know, are nuts on beds—­and they think a great big brass family bed such as—­you know—­they’re in all the department-store windows.  Well, every Turk in every village throughout Asia Minor saves up his money to buy a brass bed—­like a nigger buys a cathedral clock.  Sign of superiority.  You get me?  And it becomes his most cherished household possession.  If he meets a friend on the street he says to him naturally and easily, without too much conscious egotism, just as an American might say, ’By the way, have you seen my new limousine?’—­he says to the other Turk, ’Oh, I say, old chap, do you happen to have noticed my new brass bed from Connecticut?  They just put it off the steamer last week at Aleppo.  Fatima’s taking a nap in it now, but when she wakes up—­’”