A Busy Year at the Old Squire's

by C. A. Stephens

When I went to get ready for the jaunt grandmother charged me to be cautious and not to go into any dangerous places, and before I left the house she gave me a pair of gloves and an old green veil to protect my head.

Before starting for the woods we had to go to old Hughy's cabin to get two pails for carrying the honey and a kettle and a roll of brimstone for "stifling" the bees. As we passed the Murch farm the old man told me that he had tried to get Willis, who stood watching us in the dooryard, to go with him to listen for the bees. "But what do you think!" he exclaimed with assumed indignation. "That covetous little whelp wouldn't stir a step to help me unless I'd agree to give him half the honey! So I came to git you, for of course I knowed that as noble a boy as I've heered you be wouldn't act so pesky covetous as that."

Getting the tin pails, the kettle and the brimstone together with an axe and a compass at the old man's cabin, we went out across the fields and the pastures north of the Wilbur farm to the borders of the woods through which old Hughy wanted to follow the bees.

A line of stakes that old Hughy had set up across the open land marked the direction in which the bees had flown to the forest. After taking our bearings from them by compass we entered the woods and went on from one large tree to another. Now and again we came to an old tree that looked as if it were hollow near the top. On every such tree old Hughy knocked loudly with the axe, crying, "Hark, boy! Hark! D'ye hear 'em? D'ye see any come out up thar?" At times he drew forth his "specs" and, having adjusted them, peeped and peered upward. Like his ears, the old man's eyes were becoming too defective for bee hunting.

In that manner we went on for at least a mile, until at last we came to Swift Brook, a turbulent little stream in a deep, rocky gully. Our course led across the ravine, and while we were hunting for an easy place to descend I espied bees flying in and out of a woodpecker's hole far up toward the broken top of a partly decayed basswood tree.

"Here they are!" I shouted, much elated.

Old Hughy couldn't see them even with his glasses on, they were so high and looked so small. He knocked on the trunk of the tree, and when I told him that I could see bees pouring out and distinctly hear the hum of those in the tree he was satisfied that I had made no mistake.

When bee hunters trace a swarm to a high tree they usually fell the tree; to that task the old man and I now set ourselves. The basswood was fully three feet in diameter, and leaned slightly toward the brook. In spite of the slant, old Hughy thought that by proper cutting the tree could be made to fall on our side of the gully instead of across it. He threw off his old coat and set to work, but soon stopped short and began rubbing his shoulder and groaning, "Oh, my rheumatiz, my rheumatiz! O-o-oh, how it pains me!"

That may have been partly pretense, intended to make me take the axe; for he was a wily old fellow. However that may be, I took it and did a borrowed boy's best to cut the scarfs as he directed, but hardly succeeded. I toiled a long time and blistered my palms.

Basswood is not a hard wood, however, and at last the tree started to fall; but instead of coming down on our side of the gully it fell diagonally across it and crashed into the top of a great hemlock that stood near the stream below. The impact was so tremendous that many of the brittle branches of both trees were broken off. At first we thought that the basswood was going to break clear, but it finally hung precariously against the hemlock at a height of thirty feet or more above the bed of the brook. From the stump the long trunk extended out across the brook in a gentle, upward slant to the hemlock. The bees came out in force. Though in felling the tree I had disturbed them considerably, none of them had come down to sting us, but now they filled the air. Apparently the swarm was a large one.