ar, looked at each
other in surprise--and the bear, slipping off the baby's lap, squatted
on his furry haunches and eyed her with a sort of guilty apprehension.

"Here it was that the baby showed herself of the dominant breed. The
bear was still uneasy and afraid of her. But she, for her part, had no
more dread of him whatever. Through all her panic she had been dimly
conscious that he had been in the attitude of seeking her protection.
Now she was quite ready to give it--quite ready to take possession of
him, in fact, as really a sort of glorified Teddy Bear come to life;
and she felt her authority complete. Half-coaxingly, but quite firmly,
and with a note of command in her little voice which the animal
instinctively understood, she said: 'Turn here, Teddy!' and pulled him
back unceremoniously to her lap. The bear, with the influence of her
comforting warmth still strong upon him, yielded. It was nice, when
one was frightened and had lost one's mother, to be cuddled so softly
by a creature that was evidently friendly, in spite of the dreaded man
smell that hung about her. His mother had tried to teach him that that
smell was the most dangerous of all the warning smells his nostrils
could encounter. But the lesson had been most imperfectly learned, and
now was easily forgotten. He was tired, moreover, and wanted to go to
sleep. So he snuggled his glossy, roguish face down into the baby's
lap and shut his eyes. And the baby, filled with delight over such a
novel and interesting plaything, shook her yellow hair down over his
black fur and crooned to him a soft, half-articulate babble of
endearment.

"The swollen flood was comparatively quiet now, rolling full and turbid
over the drowned lands, and gleaming sullenly under a blaze of sun.
The bear having gone to sleep, the baby presently followed his example,
her rosy face falling forward into his woodsy-smelling black fur. At
last the raft, catching in the trees of a submerged islet, came softly
to a stop, so softly as not to awaken the little pair of sleepers.

"In the meantime two distraught mothers, quite beside themselves with
fear and grief, were hurrying downstream in search of the runaway raft
and its burden.

"The mother of the baby, when she saw the flood sweeping the raft away,
was for some moments perilously near to flinging herself in after it.
Then her backwoods common sense came to the rescue. She reflected, in
time, that she could not swim-