"Now Mr. Bee hadn't got over his cross fit a little bit, and he was only waiting for a chance to pay Mr. Elephant back. Well, he crawled into the trunk just as far as he could get, and then he gave poor Mr. Elephant the very hardest sting you ever dreamed about.
"'Oh me, oh my!' Mr. Elephant howled. 'What a wicked little thing you are! I'll fix you for that!' and then he hunched himself together, and gave the biggest kind of a big sneeze. Now if you never saw anything of the kind, you can't have an idea what a commotion it made when Mr. Elephant did that, and, bless your heart, that was the last of Mr. Bee. I don't know what became of him, and neither does anybody else. He must have been dashed to pieces in the terrible wind that was raised, and it served him good and right, too, for he deserved it just as much as ever Mr. Bear did when he got so worn out by Mr. Man's boy Tommy."
WHEN TOMMY GOT THE BEST OF MR. BEAR.
"Is that another story?" your Aunt Amy asked, and Mrs. Mouser replied with a laugh:
"Yes, and it is a good one, too. Last year there was an old Mr. Bear living near this farm, who was the most quarrelsome animal you ever saw, and besides that, he was wicked. Do you know, he made up his mind that he would bite a big piece out of Mr. Man's boy's leg, just because Tommy drove him away when he was stealing honey. So one night he crept up to the well, and got into the bucket, letting himself way down to the bottom where he could float around until Tommy came out to get a pail of water.
"'I'll have him sure,' Mr. Bear said to himself, 'for when he pulls up the bucket in the morning, I'll jump out and grab him, so he can't get away.'
"Well, Tommy went to the well at just about the same time as usual, and when he started to raise the bucket with the windlass, he found it was terribly heavy. He thought some one must have been putting rocks in it to play a joke on him, so he kept on turning the crank around until the bucket was nearly to the top, and then he saw what was the matter:
"'My goodness!' he cried. 'There's Mr. Bear, and it's water I'm after, not bear!'