“Come back, come back!” the man called.
“No, no!” Little Pig answered with a big squeal. “No, no, the bees hurt me!”
The man nodded his head.
“Of course they do,” he said. “They hurt me too! That is part of the work. You cannot be a beekeeper without getting stung.”
Little Pig blinked his beady eyes and began to think hard.
“It seems that every kind of work has something unpleasant about it. To play the violin you must practice until your arm aches. When you make cheese you dare not stop a minute until the work is done, and in taking honey from a hive the bees sting you until your head is on fire. Work in my garden is not so bad after all, and I am going back to it.”
So he said good-by to the bee man and was soon back in his carrot patch. He hoed and raked and weeded, singing as he worked, and there was no more contented pig in all that kingdom. Every autumn he took his vegetables to the fair and brought home the royal prize, and sometimes, on holidays, the cat and the dog and the bee man came to call.
THE BAT AND HIS PARTNERS
(Old Bavarian Folk Tale—Helpful in Nature Study)