“How long’ll that be?” inquired the Babe dismally.  It was hard to sit still in the hot fir thicket, with that burning, throbbing smart in his ear and two little points of fierce ache in his leg.  Uncle Andy was far from happy himself; but he felt that the Babe, who had behaved very well, must have his mind diverted.  He fished out a letter from his pocket, rolled himself, with his heavy pipe tobacco, a cigarette as thick as his finger, and fell to puffing such huge clouds as would discourage other bees from prying into the thicket.  Then he remarked irrelevantly but consolingly: 

“It isn’t always, by any means, that the bees get the best of it this way.  Mostly it’s the other way about. This bear was a fool.  But there was Teddy Bear, now, a cub over the foothills of Sugar Loaf Mountain, and he was not a fool.  When he tackled his first bee tree—­and he was nothing but a cub, mind you—­he pulled off the affair in good shape.  I wish it had been these bees that he cleaned out.”

The Babe was so surprised that he let go of his leg for a moment.

“Why?” he exclaimed, “how could a cub do what a big, strong, grown-up bear couldn’t manage?” He thought with a shudder how unequal he would be to such an undertaking.

“You just wait and see!” admonished Uncle Andy, blowing furious clouds from his monstrous cigarette.  “It was about the end of the blue-berry season when Teddy Bear lost his big, rusty-coated mother and small, glossy black sister, and found himself completely alone in the world.  They had all three come down together from the high blue-berry patches to the dark swamps to hunt for roots and fungi as a variation to their fruit diet.  The mother and sister had got caught together in a deadfall—­a dreadful trap which crushed them both flat in an instant.  Teddy Bear, some ten feet out of danger, had stared for two seconds in frozen horror, and then raced away like mad with his mother’s warning screech hoarse in his ears.  He knew by instinct that he would never see the victims any more; and he was very unhappy and lonely.  For a whole day he moped, roaming restlessly about the high slopes and refusing to eat, till at last he got so hungry that he just had to eat.  Then he began to forget his grief a little, and devoted himself to the business of finding a living.  But from being the most sunny-tempered of cubs he became all at once as peppery as could be.

“As I have told you,” continued Uncle Andy, peering at him with strange solemnity over the mud patch beneath his swollen eye, “the blue-berries were just about done.  And as Teddy would not go down to the lower lands again to hunt for other kinds of rations, he had to do a lot of hustling to find enough blue-berries for his healthy young appetite.  Thus it came about that when one day, on an out-of-the-way corner of the mountain, he stumbled upon a patch of belated berries—­large, plump, lapis-blue, and juicy—­he fairly forgot himself in his greedy excitement.  He whimpered, he grunted, he wallowed as he fed.  He had no time to look where he was going.  So, all of a sudden, he fell straight through a thick fringe of blue-berry bushes and went sprawling and clawing down the face of an almost perpendicular steep.