Was that the dormouse speaking? Anyhow, whoever it was, I think he was more than half right, don't you? Mr. Man, when he complains of these people, is apt not only to forget what he owes to them but in claiming that what they eat is wasted, to forget what a waster he is himself—wasting the soil and wasting the trees and everything.
BRER BEAR GIVES MR. MAN A PIECE OF HIS MIND
"Now just don't you overdo this Lord-of-Creation business, Mr. Man," says a deep, growly voice. (It must be Brer Bear!) "Other people have rights as well as you! And if you'd tend to your work half as well as they've attended to theirs, for ages before you were born, this would be a better world to live in; a good deal better, and there'd be a lot more of the good things of life to go around.
"And now that you've waked me up I'm going to tell you something else. You human beings are not only a hard lot, but a stupid lot. You think you're mighty smart, don't you, with your bear-traps and your shooting machines that you shoot each other with, as well as shooting the rest of us! But do you know what I think? I think if some of us—the bears or the beavers or the ants, for example—had had half your chance they'd have been twice as smart; and then we bears might have gone around shooting at you, the way Mr. Beard showed once in one of those funny pictures of his."
HUNTING THAT DOESN'T HURT
Hunting with a gun is great sport. But now you know from my story what good the animals do in the world you may not like so well to kill them. And there is a new kind of hunting that is just as much fun—with a camera. This picture shows a boy in ambush, ready to shoot, by pressing a bulb; for the bird in the tree is exactly in front of the shutter of the camera.
You see, Brer Bear has a good tongue in his head as well as a wise old head on his shoulders, and I must say he's entirely right when he makes the statement that human beings aren't anywhere near as bright, according to the chance they've had, as the bears and the beavers and the ants and the bees, and many others that could be named. Why, do you know that in the whole history of the human race there have been only a few really bright people, like Mr. Shakespere and Mr. Kipling, Mr. Archimedes and Mr. Edison. It was such men as these—not over two thousand or three thousand out of the millions upon millions of human beings who have lived on the earth—that raised the rest up from the Stone Age to where they are to-day.
"Into the coarse dough of humanity an infrequent genius has put some enchanted yeast."