Well, for a moment Mrs. Field Mouse couldn't say a word, she was so
astonished. Then she managed to gasp:

"What's their name?"

"I declare, I can't just remember," said Aunt Polly Woodchuck. "But it's
a name that rhymes with _apple tree_--though that's not quite it....
They're a very musical family, I understand. My nephew, Billy Woodchuck,
passed right by their door only yesterday; and he says he heard music and
the sound of dancing from inside the house."

"Two hundred of them dancing in that little house!" cried Mrs. Field
Mouse. "Why, it's positively dangerous! I should think they'd trample one
another."

And Aunt Polly Woodchuck agreed, before she went off towards her home
under the hill, that there were queer goings-on over there in the meadow.

Later she sent her nephew Billy to tell Mrs. Field Mouse that on her way
home she had remembered the name of the big family. It was _Bumblebee_.

"They must be an odd lot," Mrs. Field Mouse remarked to her husband.
"Farmer Green's meadow is becoming more unfashionable than ever. And I
shall never regret having moved away from there."

So that was Buster Bumblebee's first home--the old house in the meadow.
It was true that the Bumblebee family numbered at least two hundred
souls. Nobody knew what the exact count might have been; for in the
daytime all the members of the family were bustling about, never staying
in one place long enough to be counted. And at night they were all too