ell across the road.
He now felt quite sure that something was coming after him but what, he
could not imagine. Feeling curious, and a bit uneasy, for the road was
a lonely one, he turned and looked behind and there, in the full
moonlight, not forty feet away, he beheld a huge black bear following
surely in his footsteps.

There was no deceiving his eye. He had seen too many bears in days
gone by.

Grandpa Butterfield quickened his walk to a trot, which in a dozen
steps he increased to as lively a run as a man of seventy years could
muster.

Black Bruin, feeling, now that the man was running, he was afraid of
him, and seeing his precious honey rapidly moving away down the road,
went in hot pursuit.

By the time the old man had covered a hundred feet, his breath came in
quick asthmatic gasps. Craning his stiff neck to see if he had
distanced his pursuer, he saw to his horror that the bear was not
twenty feet behind him. Terror now lent wings to his rheumatic old
legs, and he sprinted another hundred feet in much quicker time than he
had the first.

But Black Bruin now felt sure that the honey was his. The man creature
was clearly afraid of him, so he too increased his pace.

Poor Grandpa Butterfield could almost feel the bear's hot breath upon
his back as he ran. Ten seconds more, he told himself, and he would be
in the clutches of this brute. His obituary and the account of his
tragic death would surely be in the county paper next week.

Suddenly his half-paralyzed brain was electrified by a thought. It was
the honey that the bear was after, and not him. Who ever heard of a
bear wanting to eat an old dried-up man, who was as tough as leather?

Without a second's delay he pitched the honey into the road behind him,
and continued his frantic flight.

A few rods farther on, feeling that he was no longer pursued, he
glanced back just long enough to see the bear tearing the paper from
the package and licking out the honey.

That evening at the country grocery the bear-story of the
squirrel-hunter was amply corroborated by Grandpa Butterfield, who was
so winded and spent with running that he could barely gasp out his
disconnected account of the chase through the woods.

The next morning, with Grandpa Butterfield as a guide, several men went
over the ground, where there was plenty of evidence to substantiate the
old man's story. The empty honey-frames were there, and the
bear-tracks told as plainly as