e Babe dismally. It was hard to sit
still in the hot fir thicket, with that burning, throbbing smart in his
ear and two little points of fierce ache in his leg. Uncle Andy was
far from happy himself; but he felt that the Babe, who had behaved very
well, must have his mind diverted. He fished out a letter from his
pocket, rolled himself, with his heavy pipe tobacco, a cigarette as
thick as his finger, and fell to puffing such huge clouds as would
discourage other bees from prying into the thicket. Then he remarked
irrelevantly but consolingly:

"It isn't always, by any means, that the bees get the best of it this
way. Mostly it's the other way about. _This_ bear was a fool. But
there was Teddy Bear, now, a cub over the foothills of Sugar Loaf
Mountain, and _he_ was _not_ a fool. When he tackled his first bee
tree--and he was nothing but a cub, mind you--he pulled off the affair
in good shape. I wish it had been _these_ bees that he cleaned out."

The Babe was so surprised that he let go of his leg for a moment.

"Why?" he exclaimed, "how could a cub do what a big, strong, grown-up
bear couldn't manage?" He thought with a shudder how unequal _he_
would be to such an undertaking.

"You just wait and see!" admonished Uncle Andy, blowing furious clouds
from his monstrous cigarette. "It was about the end of the blue-berry
season when Teddy Bear lost his big, rusty-coated mother and small,
glossy black sister, and found himself completely alone in the world.
They had all three come down together from the high blue-berry patches
to the dark swamps to hunt for roots and fungi as a variation to their
fruit diet. The mother and sister had got caught together in a
deadfall--a dreadful trap which crushed them both flat in an instant.
Teddy Bear, some ten feet out of danger, had stared for two seconds in
frozen horror, and then raced away like mad with his mother's warning
screech hoarse in his ears. He knew by instinct that he would never
see the victims any more; and he was very unhappy and lonely. For a
whole day he moped, roaming restlessly about the high slopes and
refusing to eat, till at last he got so hungry that he just _had_ to
eat. Then he began to forget his grief a little, and devoted himself
to the business of finding a living. But from being the most
sunny-tempered of cubs he became all at once as peppery as could be.

"As I have told you," continued Uncle Andy, peering at him with strange
solemnit