"Ah," said the Poet, shaking his head. "You sold my gift, did you?" "Not a bit of it," laughed the Idiot. "When your book came out I bought a copy, and two days later you sent me another with an inscription, which I treasure affectionately. I sold him the one I bought." "You are a beautiful Idiot," said the Poet, slapping his knee enthusiastically. "I don't lay claim so much to beauty as to sublimity," said the Idiot, lighting a cigar. "And even that is not to my credit. Beauty and sublimity are gifts. No amount of cultivation can produce genius when it does not exist. When I see a beautiful woman it is not she that I admire. I admire the gracious Hand that made her." "Give me that idea, old man!" cried the Poet. "It is yours from this on," said the Idiot, with a sigh. "I am not equal to it. I may be able to think thoughts, but thoughts are of no more use to me than a piano is to a man who can't read music. But we are becoming discursive. We were talking about moths, not thoughts. You said that I must have suffered, and I said that I had been tortured, and I have. My evening clothes have been ruined by them; my best shirts have been eaten by them; my silk hat, in which I have taken much pride, has four bald spots on its side because of their insatiable appetite, and as far as I can find out, I have no redress. You can't sue a moth for damages, you know, with any degree of satisfaction." "Why should you expect to sue a moth for damages any more than to have a mosquito indicted for assault?" suggested the Poet. "Oh, as for that," said the Idiot, "you can treat the mosquito without much difficulty. He merits capital punishment, and if you are yourself alert you can squash him at the moment of his crime. But the moth is different. You are absolutely helpless in the face of him. He works in secret." "I am told that there are such things as camphor-balls," observed the Poet. "There are," said the Idiot. "And I truly think the moth enjoys them as much as a young girl enjoys a military ball. Whenever we give a camphor-ball the moths attend, and as far as I can find out dance all through it. They seem to enjoy functions of that nature. Furthermore, I have yet to meet the man who likes to go about in a suit of clothes that smells like a drug-store. I don't. I hate the odor of camphor, and if I have my choice of going to a dinner in a perforated dress-suit or in one that is redolent of the camphor-ball, I prefer the one with holes in it. What I can't understand is why a race as proud as the one to which you and I belong should have to knuckle under to an inferior lot of insects such as the moth represents." [Illustration: "'THE LION, THE ELEPHANT, THE TIGER, ALL HAVE THEIR WORK TO DO'"]