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,