d Mr. Clapp reasoned that he would be more likely to leave it in
sight than to hide it.

When the search had been finished in the room, and the result was as
the detective anticipated, Leo led the way to the cellar. Here was
presented to the visitors a complete revelation of the boy's character
and tastes--a revelation which assured the skilful detective, deeply
versed as he was in a knowledge of human nature, that Leo was not a boy
to be in league with bad men, or knowingly to assist a robber in
disposing of his ill-gotten booty.

The cellar or basement was only partly under ground, and there was room
enough for two pretty large windows at each end, the front and rear of
the house, and in the daytime the apartment was as light and cheerful
as the rooms up stairs. Across the end, under the front windows, was a
workbench, with a variety of carpenter's tools, few in number, and of
the most useful kind. On the bench was an unfinished piece of work,
whose intended use would have puzzled a philosopher, if several similar
specimens of mechanism, completed and practically applied, had not
appeared in the cellar to explain the problem.

On the wall of the basement, and on a post in the centre of it,
supported by brackets, were half a dozen queer little structures,
something like miniature houses, all of them occupied by, and some of
them swarming with, _white mice_. In the construction of these houses,
or, as Andre facetiously called them, "_Les Palais des Mice_," Leo
displayed a great deal of skill and ingenuity. He was a natural-born
carpenter, with inventive powers of a high order. He not only made them
neatly and nicely, but he designed them, making regular working plans
for their construction.

The largest of them was about three feet long. At each end of a board
of this length, and fifteen inches in width, was a box or house, seven
inches deep, to contain the retiring rooms and nests of the occupants
of the establishment. Each of these houses was three stories high, and
each story contained four apartments, or twenty-four in the whole
palace. The space between the two houses was open in front, leaving an
area of twenty-two by fifteen inches for a playground, or grand parade,
for the mice. The three sides of this middle space were filled with
shelves or galleries, from which opened the doors leading into the
private apartments. The galleries were reached by inclined planes, cut
like steps.

Monsieur Souris Blanc pass