new or
old swarm was trying to drive out a weak one and take its place. Anyway,
there were about a million of those bees buzzing and whirling about
outside, and you could smell that they were mad, and you could see that
they were fighting, for there were dead ones on the ground, and they
were pattering down on the leaves quite fast. Cousin Redfield and I
first thought it was sprinkling, until we saw that the falling drops
were dead bees.

"But that was nothing to what happened a few minutes later. For all
those other swarms, one after another, pretty soon began to pour out
from the different holes in the limbs and body of the tree, and join in
the war, until the air around that tree was just black with fighting
bees, and the dead ones were coming down so thick that I would not have
cared to stand under it without Mr. Man's umbrella.

"Cousin Redfield and I got off a little ways to watch it. Cousin
Redfield said that perhaps we ought to interfere, but I said that it
wasn't our war, and that it would be better to wait and see what we
could do when it was over.

"So we got in a good safe place and looked on, and I never thought
anything could be like it. I don't know how those bees could decide
which side they were on, or what they were fighting about, or which side
was which. They must have been all relatives once, and would be all
cousins, or something, now. They all looked exactly alike to Cousin
Redfield and me, and pretty soon they got very thick on the ground, like
a kind of black moss or something, that was spreading and piling up
deeper every minute and doing nobody any good, and not deciding
anything, that we could see. Cousin Redfield and I made up our minds
that they had all gone crazy.

"I don't know how many millions of those bees there were, but they made
a noise like Mr. Man's automobile when it is running at high speed, and
that mad-bee smell was so strong that it seemed to Cousin Redfield and
me almost dangerous to stay there. So we got a little farther away, for
we didn't know but that all those bees might suddenly decide to quit
fighting one another, and make a rush at us. But that didn't happen.
They were too busy with their war. They kept on pouring out of the tree
until there were no more left to come, and that black cloud whizzed and
stung and smelled, and the black moss on the ground kept growing and
spreading until we could see that the live ones were thinning out. By
and by there were more b