ing, and playing, and seemed to be always happy. And it 

 came to pass that after a while there were some cute little baby 

 squirrels in that hollow branch, and then the mother squirrel 

 stayed pretty close to home. But one day she went to the 

 river for a drink of water, and on coming back met a white 

 boy with a gun and dog. She made a frantic effort to reach 

 her home tree, bjit was weak from nursing, and the dog headed 

 her off, and she was compelled to climb a little tree near me. 

 Then that boy walked up and shot her, and she fell to the. 

 ground in dying convulsions, splashing the fallen leaves and 

 the grass with her blood. The boy picked her up and looked 

 at her, saw that she had been nursing, so I suppose he con- 

 cluded she was not fit for food, and he threw the body down 

 on the ground and walked away. That afternoon a white 

 man's hog came along, found the little carcass, and tore it to 

 pieces and devoured it. Soon I began to hear the baby squir- 

 rels making pitiful little calls for their mother, plaintive squeak- 

 ing cries, but she could not come. But these sounds of distress 

 gradually became fewer, and fainter, and fainter, and after a 

 while ceased altogether. The little ones were dead, having 

 perished miserably from hunger and starvation. No squirrels 

 ever came again to this hollow limb to stay, but it was occu- 

 pied next year by a different kind of lodgers. 



"Sometime during that summer a small swarm of wild 

 bees came along, settled on my boughs, and after some inspec- 

 tion of the inside of this branch, took up their home therein, 

 and went to making honey. I was much pleased with this. I 

 was well acquainted with wild bees, as for many years they 

 had been in the habit of lighting on my leaves and helping 

 themselves to their juicy moisture. And so all that pleasant 

 summer these industrious little things flew around me, bring- 

 ing in their store of honey. And it seemed to me that I could 

 almost taste it, for its sweet odor and flavor appeared as if 

 it mingled with my sap and thus went all through me. One 

 fine day, when the bees were busy at their work, a lone white 

 man came along and stopped beneath me and peered up into 

 my branches. I soon saw that he was watching the bees as 

 they flew in and out of the little door of their home, and his 



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