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one daughter. Still the locksmith was not called to fix 

 the front door. One day this unmarried daughter, in 

 a fit of dire impatience, got at the door herself, and 

 found that the key had been inserted just twenty-one 

 years before — upside down! 



So I had sat on the porch and guessed about it. I 

 had left the key upside down in the lock of the front 

 door, and had gone out by way of the kitchen. 



The first necessity for interesting nature study is an 

 intimate acquaintance with some locality. It does not 

 matter how small, how commonplace, how near the 

 city, — the nearer the better, provided there are trees, 

 water, fences, and some seclusion. If your own roof- 

 tree stands in the midst of it all, then that is ideal. 



But you must be limited. It is a small amount of 

 land that one man can till with profit. Your very 

 bees range hardly more than two miles from the 

 hive. They cannot fly farther than that and store 

 honey. Within this little world, however, they know 

 every bank whereon the honey-yielding flowers grow. 

 In early August I can follow their line of flight 

 westward, through the woods for more than a mile, 

 to an old pasture where great patches of dwarf sumac 

 are in bloom. The bees hum about me in a fever 



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