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“Maybe it isn’t,” said the second office boy. “I’ll see.”

He picked the Calico Clown up off the floor, punched him in the chest, and the gay red and yellow chap banged his cymbals together.

“He’s all right so far,” said the second office boy. “Now we’ll pull the strings.”

“And there’s where trouble may come in,” thought the Calico Clown himself, for he heard and saw and felt all that went on. “I’m almost sure my glued leg is broken,” said the Clown to himself.

But when the strings were pulled, one after another, and the arms and legs and head of the funny fellow twisted and turned and jerked, the two office boys and the typewriter girl laughed. And the Clown himself was glad, for he felt that he was not broken.

“If the Boss comes in and finds you playing with that Clown you’ll catch it,” said the girl to the first office boy, after a while.

“I guess I’d better put him back on the desk. I’m going out to get my dinner pretty soon,” the boy said.

And a little later, while the girl was in an outer office looking over some papers and while the Man was still at his lunch and while the office boy was out getting something to eat, the Calico Clown was left alone with the Ink-Well Dwarf.

“How do you do?” politely asked the Clown.

“Very well, thank you,” answered the Dwarf. “And how are you? Where did you come from? Are you going to work here?”

“I never work!” exclaimed the Clown. “I am only to make jolly fun and laughter.”

“Then this is no place for you,” went on the Dwarf. “This is an office, and we must all work, though I must admit that those boys seem to get as much fun out of it as any one. They’re always skylarking, cutting up, and playing jokes. But I work myself. I hold ink for the Boss.”

“I see you do,” answered the Clown. “I suppose I don’t really belong here, made only for fun, as I am. And I did not want to come here. It was quite accidental. I was brought.”

“How!” asked the Ink-Well Dwarf.

“In the pocket of the Man they call the Boss,” was the reply. And then the Clown told of how he had fallen out of the tree.

All the remainder of the day the Calico Clown sat on the desk of the Man, wondering what would happen to him. At last he found out.

At the close of the afternoon, when no more business was to be done, the Man arose and closed his desk. He put papers in his different pockets to take home with him, and then he saw the Calico Clown.

“Oh, I mustn’t forget you!” he said, speaking out loud as he sometimes did when alone. And he was alone in the office now, for the boy and the typewriter girl had gone. “I’ll take you home and ask Arnold or Mirabell to whom you belong,” went on the man. “You are some child’s toy, I’m sure of that, and one of my children may know where you live.”

The Calico Clown knew this to be so, and he knew that either Arnold or Mirabell would at once be able to say that the Clown belonged to Sidney, for they had seen Sidney playing with this toy.

“Back into my pocket you go!” said the Man, and he took the Clown down off the top of the desk. “There are a lot of handkerchiefs in that pocket,” the man went on. “They’ll make a good, soft bed for you to lie on.”

And, surely enough, there was a soft bed of handkerchiefs for the Calico Clown. They were handkerchiefs the man had been carrying in his pocket for some time, and he had forgotten to put them in the wash, as his wife, over and over again, had told him to do.

A little later, with the Calico Clown nestled down in among a pile of handkerchiefs in his pocket, the Man started for home from his office.