Hanged if I know what a conclave is. It’s some kind of a meeting I guess. He said it was something like a peace conference, but believe me, the meeting I’m going to tell you about wasn’t much like a peace conference. I told him I’d use my own heading and his too, just to keep him quiet. I think he’s got his pockets stuffed full of chapter headings and that he’ll be shooting them at me all the way through—like a machine-gun. I guess I might as well tell you about Pee-wee, before I tell you about the conclave or whatever you call it. He’s Doctor Harris’s son and he’s a member of the Raven Patrol. He’s a member in good standing, only he doesn’t stand very high. Honest, you can hardly see him without a magnifying glass. But for voice—_good night_! He sings in the Methodist Church choir and they say he can throw his voice anywhere. I wish he’d throw it in the ash barrel, I know that. He always wears his belt-axe to troop meetings, in case the Germans should invade Bridgeboro, I suppose. He’s the troop mascot and if you walk around him three times and ruffle up his beautiful curly hair, you can change your luck. Well, now I’ll tell you about the meeting. We had a big special meeting to decide about two things, and believe me, those two things had momentous consequences. _Momentous_—that’s a good word, hey? One thing, we wanted to decide about our campaign for collecting books for soldiers, and another thing, we wanted to decide how we could all go up to Temple Camp in our cabin launch, the _Good Turn_. This large and what-do-you-call-it launch—I mean commodious launch—is a dandy boat, except for one thing—the bow is too near the stern. If we were sardines instead of boy scouts, it would be all right, but you see there’s twenty-four of us altogether, not counting Captain Kidd, our mascot—he’s a parrot. So I got up and said, “How are we going to crowd twenty-four growing boys and a parrot into a twenty foot launch?” “It can’t be did,” Doc Carson shouted. “Then some of us will have to hike it on our dear little feet,” I said. “Or else we’ll have to get a barge or something or other and tow it,” Artie Van Arlen said. “What, with a three horsepower engine?” somebody else shouted. “You can bet I won’t be one of the ones to hike it,” Pee-wee yelled; “I’ll dope out some scheme or other.” And _believe me_, he did. Well, after we’d been talking about an hour or so on how we’d manage it, Mr. Ellsworth, our scoutmaster, up and said there was plenty of time for that as long as we were not going to camp for a couple of weeks anyway, and that we’d better begin thinking of how we were going to start about collecting books for soldiers. All the while I had something very important to say, and I was kind of trembling, as you might say, for I thought maybe Mr. Ellsworth wouldn’t like the idea. Anyway I got up and began: