92 THE HIVE OF THE BEE-HUNTER. 
“J started after, but was tripped up by my inex- 
pressibles, which, either from habit or the excitement of 
the moment, were about my heels, and before I had 
really gathered myself up, I heard the old varmint 
groaning, like a thousand sinners, in a thicket near by, 
and, by the time I reached him, he was a corpse. 
‘Stranger, it took five niggers and myself to put that 
carcass on a mule’s back, and old long-ears waddled 
under his load, as if he was foundered in every leg of 
his body; and with a common whopper of a bear, he 
would have trotted off, and enjoyed himself. 
“Twould astonish you to know how big he was: 
I made a bed-spread of his skin, and the way it used 
to cover my bear mattress, and leave several feet on each 
side to tuck up, would have delighted you. It was, in 
fact, a creation bear, and if it had lived in Samson’s 
time, and had met him in a fair fight, he would have 
licked him in the twinkling of a dice-box. 
‘But, stranger, I never liked the way I hunted hin, 
and missed him. There is something curious about it, 
that I never could understand,—and I never was satis- 
fied at his giving in so easy at last. Prehaps he had 
heard of my preparations to hunt him the next day, so 
he jist guv up, like Captain Scott’s coon, to save his 
wind to grunt with in dying; but that ain’t likely. My 
private opinion is, that that bear was an wnhuntable bear, 
and died when his tume come.” 
When this story was ended, our hero sat some min- 
