It is not an easy thing to do, to pick one bee out of a bottle full, with his fingers, and not get into trouble. The first bee Mr. Middlerib got was a little brown honey-bee that wouldn’t weigh half an ounce if you picked him up by the ears, but if you lifted him by the hind leg as Mr. Middlerib did, would weigh as much as the last end of a bay mule. Mr. Middlerib could not repress a groan.
“What’s the matter with you?” sleepily asked his wife.
It was very hard for Mr. Middlerib to say; he only knew his temperature had risen to 86 all over, and to 197 on the end of his thumb. He reversed the bee and pressed the warlike terminus of it firmly against his rheumatic knee.
It didn’t hurt so badly as he thought it would.
It didn’t hurt at all!
Then Mr. Middlerib remembered that when the honey-bee stabs a human foe it generally leaves its harpoon in the wound, and the invalid knew then the only thing the bee had to sting with was doing its work at the end of his thumb.
He reached his arm out from under the sheet, and dropped this disabled atom of rheumatism liniment on the carpet. Then, after a second of blank wonder, he began to feel around for the bottle, and wished he knew what he had done with it.
In the meantime, strange things had been going on. When he caught hold of the first bee, Mr. Middlerib, for reasons, drew it out in such haste that for the time he forgot all about the bottle and its remedial contents, and left it lying uncorked in the bed. In the darkness there had been a quiet but general emigration from that bottle. The bees, their wings clogged with the water Mr. Middlerib had poured upon them to cool and tranquilize them, were crawling aimlessly about over the sheet. While Mr. Middlerib was feeling around for it, his ears were suddenly thrilled and his heart frozen by a wild, piercing scream from his wife.
“Murder!” she screamed, “murder! Oh, help me! Help! help!”
Mr. Middlerib sat bold upright in bed. His hair stood on end. The night was very warm, but he turned to ice in a minute.