o stagger
aside from his mother's spacious tracks, he sank to his belly in the
rim of a "honey-pot."

Panic-stricken, he floundered vainly, his nose high in the air and his
eyes shut tight, while his mother, unconscious of what had happened,
ploughed doggedly onward. Presently he opened his eyes. His mother was
now perhaps ten or a dozen feet ahead, apparently deserting him. Right
behind, lapping up to his very tail, was the crawling wave. A
heart-broken bawl burst from his throat.

At that cry the old bear came dashing back, red mud half-way up her
flanks and plastered all over her shaggy chest. Taking in the
situation at a glance, she seized the cub by the nape of the neck with
her teeth, and tried to drag him free. But he squealed so lamentably
that she realized that the hide would yield before the mud would. The
attempt had taken time, however; and the tide was now well up in the
fur of his back. Thrusting her paw down beneath his haunches, she tore
him clear with a mighty wrench and a loud sucking of the baffled mud.
That stroke sent him head over heels some ten feet nearer safety. By
the time he had picked himself up, pawing fretfully at the mud that
bedaubed his face and half blinded him, his mother was close behind
him, nosing him along and lifting him forward skilfully with her fore
paws.

The slope of the flats was now so gradual as to be almost imperceptible;
and the tide, therefore, seemed to be racing in with fiercer haste, as
if in wrath at being so long balked of its prey. Engrossed in her
efforts to push the cub forward, the mother now lost some of her fine
discrimination in regard to "honey-pots." She pushed the cub straight
into one; but jerked him back unceremoniously before the mud had time
to get any grip upon him. Pausing for a moment to scrutinize the
oozy expanse, she thrust the little animal furiously along to the left,
searching for a safe passage. Before she could find one, however, the
tide was upon them, their feet splashing in the thin yellow wavelets.

A broken soap-box, tossed overboard from some ship, came washing up,
and stranded just before them. With a whimper of delight, as if he
thought the box a safe refuge, the cub scrambled upon it; but his
mother ruthlessly tumbled him off and hustled him onward, floundering
and splashing.

"Ye'll hev to swim fer it, Old Woman!" growled the now excited watcher
behind the pine-tree on the cliff.

As the creeping flood by this time overspr