In lieu of a left hand, the one-armed justice of the peace had a steel hook, which he managed with an address that Royal could but admire. He carefully examined our poet’s possessions; his purse, food, poems, matches, wristwatch, toothbrush, Iliad, flashlight. The purse, poems, and food he regarded as negligible. The Iliad received from him both respect and scorn; respect because it was print, scorn because it was print he couldn’t read. “Your Koran, ain’t it?” He asked the question with the irony he thought due to those who gave false addresses. Royal trembled when hand and hook turned those Homeric pages. His father’s bookplate might give the whole show away. But fortunately that telltale emblem escaped the hook-and-eye of justice. And the man’s idea of calling the book a Koran had in it something that appealed strongly to the inventor’s own imagination; he played upon the theme with alliterative variations. “Kid carries Koran,” he ejaculated while pulling out a rickety settee for the repose of the accused. Hooking up Royal’s flashlight, he discovered a tattered blanket belonging to the movie-man, and this he threw over the settee, still improvising. “Koran concealed on Courteous Kid.” Perhaps that fancy of his softened his fibre. He had pocketed Royal’s matches, and was about to confiscate his flashlight also, when a humane thought occurred to him. For our humor may at times produce humanity in ourselves, if not in those whom we expose to it. “Well, kid, I guess I’ll leave you your light to read your Koran by. Sorry we can’t give you a prayer-rug too, but our finest Orientals are in storage, this season.” (He’d show the young fella ’t givin’ false addresses was a game two could play at!) Royal was relieved when at last the justice really locked the door, and departed. Something to tell old Peter, this.