mself, Buster Bumblebee bustled over to the doorway
and said to old Spot:

"Do you hear that bee? He's inside the fiddle!"

Then old Spot actually laughed aloud.

"You're mistaken," he replied. "That's the bumblebee in the pumpkin."

"Bumblebee!" Buster cried. "Pardon me--but you are mistaken yourself.
That's no bumblebee. No member of my family ever buzzed like that.... It
must be a raising bee."

"Perhaps you know best," said old Spot. "But the people here all say it's
a bumblebee--in a pumpkin."

"What pumpkin?" Buster wanted to know.

"Well, that one--I suppose," old dog Spot told him, cocking an eye and an
ear towards a big yellow pumpkin, which someone had set on a wide shelf
on the wall.

Buster Bumblebee looked at the pumpkin. And then he darted straight to
it. If there was a bee of any kind inside it, making that strange
buzzing, he intended to have a good look at him.

XXII

SOMEONE'S MISTAKE

Though he alighted right on top of the pumpkin, which stood on the wide
shelf in Farmer Green's carriage-house, Buster Bumblebee thought that the
strange buzzing sound had grown fainter. He was sure that he had heard it
more plainly when he was nearer the merry fiddler.

There was a gouge in the side of the fat pumpkin, into which he peered
carefully. He even crawled into the small cavity himself. But there was
nothing there. And he decided, after thinking deeply for some time, that
there could not possibly be a bee inside the pumpkin.

As soon as he had made up his mind on that point Buster Bumblebee
blustered back to old dog Spot once more.

"You're certainly wrong!" he exclaimed. "There's no bumblebee--nor any
other sort of bee--anywhere near the pumpkin."

"There was one there only a moment ago," old Spot remarked with a sly
smile.

"I didn't see him," said Buster Bumblebee, looking much puzzled.

"Well, _I_ did," old Spot replied. "And that proves that I'm right."

Buster Bumblebee could think of no good retort to make at that moment.
And since the odd buzzing had stopped, and all three fiddlers were tuning
up for more dance music, in his excitement Buster forgot all about the
raising bee again, the bumblebee in the pumpkin, and even his dispute
with old dog Spot.

So the dance went on. And at last, late in the afternoon, the people
suddenly remembered that they had to go home to milk the cows. Then the
fiddlers put away their fiddles; for the dance had come to an end. And
Buster Bum