THE SEVEN SLEEPERS 181 
that bear again. Probably he laughed himself to 
death. 
The blackbear is undoubtedly leather-lined, for 
he will dig up and eat the bulbs of the jack-in-the- 
pulpit, which affect a human tongue — I speak from 
knowledge — like a mixture of nitric acid and 
powdered glass. Moreover, he is the only animal 
which can swallow the tight-rolled green cigars of 
the skunk-cabbage in the early spring. An entry in 
my nature-notes reads as follows:— 
“Only a fool or a bear would taste skunk-cabbage.”’ 
My lips were blistered and my tongue swollen 
when I wrote it. The fact that the blackbear and the 
blackcat or fisher are the only two mammals which 
can eat Old Man Quill-Pig, alias porcupine, and 
swallow his quills, confirms my belief as to the bear’s 
lining. The dog, the lynx, the wild cat, and the 
wolf have all tried — and died. 
Last spring, in northern Pennsylvania I found 
myself on the top of a mountain, by the side of one 
of those trembling bogs locally known as _ bear- 
sloughs. There I had highly resolved to find the nest 
of a nearby Nashville warbler, which kept singing its 
song, which begins like a black-and-white warbler 
and ends like a chipping sparrow. I did not suppose 
that there was a bear within fifty miles of me. 
Suddenly I came upon a large, quaking-aspen tree 
set back in the woods by the side of the bog. Its 
smooth bark was furrowed by ascore of deep scratches 
and ridges about five feet from the ground, while 
above them the tree had apparently been repeatedly 
