"I wish I'd brought my pipe along," he muttered. "It's over there by
the rock. But I reckon it wouldn't be healthy for me to go and get it
just yet!"

"What's made them so awful mad, do you suppose?" inquired the Babe,
nursing his wounds and listening uneasily to the vicious hum which
filled the air outside the thicket.

"It's that fool bear!" replied Uncle Andy. "He's struck a bee tree too
tough for him to tear open, and he fooled at it just long enough to get
the bees good and savage. Then he quit in a hurry. And we'll just
have to stay here till the bees get cooled down."

"How long'll that be?" inquired the 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."