"Where is it?" asked Mollie, searching the room with her eye for the Cupid.
"I've spread it out through the Museum so as to make it look more like a collection," said the Unwiseman. "I got a tack-hammer as soon as I got home last night and fixed it up. There's an arm over on the mantel-piece. His chest and left leg are there on top of the piano, while his other arm with his left ear and right leg are in the kitchen. I haven't found places for his stummick and what's left of his head yet, but I will before the crowd begins to arrive."
"Why Mr. Me!" protested Mollie, as she gazed mournfully upon the scraps of the broken Cupid. "You didn't really smash up that pretty little statue?"
"I'm afraid I did, Mollie," said the Unwiseman sadly. "I hated to do it, but this is a Museum my dear, and when you go into the museum business you've to do it according to the rules. One of the rules seems to be 'No admission to Unbusted Statuary,' and I've acted accordingly. I don't want to deceive anybody and if I gave even to my kitchen-stove the idea that these first class museums over in Europe have anything but fractures in them——"
"Fragments, isn't it?" suggested Mollie.
"It's all the same," said the Unwiseman, "Fractures or fragments, there isn't a complete statue anywhere in any museum that I ever saw, and in educating my kitchen-stove in Art I'm going to follow the lead of the experts."
"Well I don't see the use of it," sighed Mollie, for she had admired the pretty little plaster Cupid very much indeed.
"No more do I, Mollie dear," said the Unwiseman, "but rules are rules and we've got to obey them. This is the Grand Canal at Venice," he added holding up a bottle full of dark green water in order to change the subject. "And here is what I call a Hoople-fish from the Adriatic."
"What on earth is a Hoople-fish?" cried Mollie with a roar of laughter as she gazed upon the object to which the Unwiseman referred, an old water soaked strip of shingley wood.
"It is the barrel hoop I caught that day I went fishing from the hotel balcony," explained the Unwiseman. "I wish I'd kept the artist's straw hat I landed at the same time for a Hat-fish to complete my collection of Strange Shad From Venice, but of course that was impossible. The artist seemed to want it himself and as he had first claim to it I didn't press the matter. The barrel-hoop will serve however to warn Americans who want to go salmon fishing on the Grand Canal just what kind of queer things they'll catch if they have any luck at all."