houses and took toll of the farmers.
His wariness in regard to men, which he had learned partly of White
Nose and partly from sad experience, gradually wore away and his old
life with Pedro helped him to forget how strange and fearful a creature
man is, when dealing with wild beasts.

So while he came and went much more recklessly than he would otherwise
have done, yet his knowledge of man's ways stood him in good stead.

He knew that man was a creature of the day, doing his work in broad
daylight, while the bear is a night prowler. He knew that at morning
and evening man came and went from the fields to his den, where he
always stayed at night.

He knew at just what hours the man-beast would be sleeping, and when he
would come forth and tend his creatures. He had often followed his own
master in the old cubhood days at the farmhouse, from outbuilding to
outbuilding, watching him do the morning chores.

Man's thunder and lightning he also knew and feared more than all his
other powers. Dogs he despised and he also hated them, for they often
interrupted him in his thieving.

One Sunday morning early in June Black Bruin had been prowling about a
little Canadian village and had satisfied his appetite with a
hen-turkey, which he had happened to discover sitting far from home.
He was returning to his mountain, when, in crossing one of those broad
paths in which men always traveled, he so far forgot his usual
precautions as nearly to run into a team carrying a half-witted French
boy to early mass, that was being celebrated in the little French
Catholic church near by.

Upon seeing the enormous black bear at such close quarters, the boy's
hair fairly stood up with fright and whipping up his horse he was soon
at the church. Throwing the lines upon the horse's back, he bolted
into the sanctuary, although mass was in progress, crying, "I see one
deevil bar, as beeg as a mountain, I deed."

Just as the boy entered the church, a large Newfoundland dog, which had
followed one of the worshipers to mass and was waiting for his master
upon the steps, like a good Catholic, became excited at the boy's
frantic manner and bounded into the church after him.

Seeing the great shaggy dog appear at the same instant that the boy
announced his "deevil bar," in the dimly lighted church, the worshipers
at once jumped to the conclusion that this was the "deevil bar" who had
come to eat them all up, like the wolf in "Red Riding Hood."