The Bay of the Band 
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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