JOHN ATWOOD. 37 



would announce the wounded! Fun? It was the very 

 height of fun, with its spice of danger, without which 

 some one has said there is no sport. Those who know 

 the bald-faced hornet know that he is as swift as a hum- 

 ming-bird and carries a poniard that for penetration and 

 venom discounts a bumblebee or any other stinger with 

 wings, and this reminds me : John Atwood and I had been 

 away beyond Bath after berries, when we passed a house 

 that stood only a few feet from the road. In front, just 

 inside the picket fence, stood a tall pear tree, well loaded. 

 'Them's nice pears," said John, disdaining all grammat- 

 ical rules; "le's have some." A study of the situation 

 showed that I could easily mount the tree, shake it, and 

 drop about ten feet in the road, and if the people in the 

 house were aroused John would be off with what pears he 

 could get outside the fence. I shook. Hard, burning 

 things struck my face, and I saw the nest of a colony of 

 bald-faced hornets within a foot of my head. Something 

 dropped it was I, and I dropped running. Oh, the agony 

 of eleven stings on head, face and neck, and the swollen 

 face of a boy whom his mother did not know an hour 

 later! Days in bed and a doctor seem a trifle now. The 

 pears were not good and John Atwood did not get a sting. 

 To-day, in 1896, it seems as if it was my mission to volun- 

 teer if there were hard knocks to be got, while some other 

 fellow got the pears. But this is a most common case, 

 and we see that same sort of a fellow every day ; and in the 

 economy of nature he is a necessity to the fellow who 

 gets the pears without the stings. 



John taught me how to snare the brook suckers with a 

 noose of copper wire on the end of a pole. Brass wire 

 was too stiff, he said, and horsehair was not stiff enough. 

 We would get above the fish and drift the open loop so as 

 to inclose him, and when it was about his middle a smart 



