“Where, oh, where,” he said, with pallid lips, as he felt all over the bed in frenzied haste—“where in the world are those infernal bees?”
And a large “bumble,” with a sting as pitiless as the finger of scorn, just then lighted between Mr. Middlerib’s shoulders, and went for his marrow, and said calmly: “Here is one of them.”
And Mrs. Middlerib felt ashamed of her feeble screams when Mr. Middlerib threw up both arms, and, with a howl that made the windows rattle, roared:
“Take him off! Oh, land of Scott, somebody take him off!”
And when a little honey-bee began tickling the sole of Mrs. Middlerib’s foot, she shrieked that the house was bewitched, and immediately went into spasms.
The household was aroused by this time. Miss Middlerib, and Master Middlerib and the servants were pouring into the room, adding to the general confusion, by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man, a little on in years, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird, wicked-looking jig by the dim religious light of the night lamp.
And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety, and to keep the menagerie stirred up, had dried his legs and wings with a corner of the sheet, after a preliminary circle or two around the bed, to get up his motion and settle down to a working gait, fired himself across the room, and to his dying day Mr. Middlerib will always believe that one of the servants mistook him for a burglar, and shot him.
No one, not even Mr. Middlerib himself, could doubt that he was, at least for the time, most thoroughly cured of rheumatism. His own boy could not have carried himself more lightly or with greater agility. But the cure was not permanent, and Mr. Middlerib does not like to talk about it.