“Betty!  Betty!”

“Oh dear!” thought the little maid, diving still deeper into the light grass, “there’s Olga calling me to take care of Roger while she gets his bread and milk ready.  I don’t see why she can’t wait a minute till I rest.  It’s too hot now.  Baby can do without his dinner for a minute, I should think,—­just a minute or so.  He won’t mind.  He ’s glad to wait if only you give him Mamma’s chain and don’t take away her watch.  Ye-es, Olga,—­I ’ll come—­by and by.”

A big velvety humble-bee came, boom! against Betty’s head, and got tangled in her hair.  He shook himself free and went reeling on his way in quite a drunken fashion, thinking probably that was a very disagreeable variety of dandelion he had stumbled across,—­quite too large and fluffy for comfort, though it was such a pretty yellow.

Betty lazily raised her head and peered after him.  “I wonder where you’re going,” she said, half aloud.

The humble-bee veered about and came bouncing back in her direction again, and when he reached the little grass-heap in which she lay, stopped so suddenly that he went careering over in the most ridiculous fashion possible, and Betty laughed aloud.  But to her amazement the humble-bee righted himself in no time at all, and then remarked in quite a dignified manner and with some asperity,—­

“If I were a little girl with gilt hair and were n’t doing what I ought, and if I had wondered where a body was going and the body had come back expressly to tell me, I think I ’d have the politeness not to laugh if the body happened to lose his balance and fall,—­especially when the body was going to get up in less time than it would take me to wink,—­I being only a little girl, and he being a most respected member of the Busy-bee Society.  However, I suppose one must make allowances for the way in which children are brought up nowadays.  When I was a little—­”

“Now, please don’t say, ’When I was a little girl,’—­for you never were a little girl, you know,” interrupted Betty, not intending to be saucy, but feeling rather provoked that a mere humble-bee should undertake to rebuke her.  “Mamma always says, ’When I was a little girl,’ and so does Aunt Louie, and so does everybody; and I ’m tired of hearing about it, so there!”

The humble-bee gave his gorgeous waistcoat a pull which settled it more smoothly over his stout person, and remarked shortly,—­

“In the first place, I was n’t going to say, ’When I was a little girl.’  I was going to say, ‘When I was a little leaner,’ but you snapped me up so.  However, it’s true, isn’t it?  Everybody was a little girl once, were n’t she?—­was n’t they?—­hem!—­confusing weather for talking, very!  And what is true one ought to be glad to hear, eh?”

“But it is n’t true that everybody was once a little girl; some were little boys.  There!”

“Do you know,” whispered the humble-bee, in a very impressive undertone, as if it were a secret that he did not wish any one else to hear, “that you are a very re-mark-a-ble young person to have been able to remind me, at a moment’s notice, that some were little boys?  Why-ee!”