.
"Oh, I will attend to that myself," said I, but I made no step to do
it. When my hostess came back I wanted to be there.

Presently she did come back. She ran in hurriedly, and her face was
flushed. "Here is a very bad piece of business," she said. "That man's
bear has eaten the tire off one of your wheels!"

"What!" I exclaimed, and my heart bounded within me. Here, perhaps,
was the solution of all my troubles. If by any happy chance my bicycle
had been damaged, of course I could not go on.

"Come and see," she said, and, following her through the back hall
door, we entered a large, enclosed yard. Not far from the house was a
shed, and in front of this lay my bicycle on its side in an apparently
disabled condition. An Italian, greatly agitated, was standing by it.
He was hatless, and his tangled black hair hung over his swarthy face.
At the other end of the yard was a whitish-brown bear, not very large,
and chained to a post.

I approached my bicycle, earnestly hoping that the bear had been
attempting to ride it, but I found that he had been trying to do
something very different. He had torn the pneumatic tire from one of
the wheels, and nearly the whole of it was lying scattered about in
little bits upon the ground.

"How did this happen?" I said to the Italian, feeling very much
inclined to give him a dollar for the good offices of the beast.

The man began immediately to pour out an explanation upon me. His
English was as badly broken as the torn parts of my tire, but I had no
trouble in understanding. The bear had got loose in the night. He had
pulled up a little post to which he had been chained. The man had not
known it was such a weak post. The bear was never muzzled at night. He
had gone about looking for something to eat. He was very fond of
India-rubber--or, as the man called it, "Injer-rub." He always ate up
India-rubber shoes wherever he could find them. He would eat them off
a man's feet if the man should be asleep. He liked the taste of
Injer-rub. He did not swallow it. He dropped it all about in little
bits.

[Illustration: BUT WE WERE NOT ALONE]

Then the man sprang towards me and seized the injured wheel. "See!" he
exclaimed. "He eat your Injer-rub, but he no break your machine!"

This was very true. The wheel did not seem to be injured, but still I
could not travel without a tire. This was the most satisfactory
feature of the affair. If he and I had been alone together I would
have hande