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 French or something, but there wasn’t any use in talking English before his bees, because they understood him just as well as I did! I tried hard enough to do what he told me, but whenever I’d zig, the darn bee would zig, too; and whenever I’d leap to one side and try to zag, the bee had zagged just a little bit before Ihad, and just naturally, workin’ it that way, we interfered. Say, did a Black German ever zip you?”

Jamie’s face went black for an instant, and then he looked at the eager little face in front of him and let the instant pass as he said, quietly, “Not with the stinger of a bee. No. But I’ve had a few experiences with wasps and hornets out in the fields and woods when I was a boy. I get the general idea.”

"I hardly think you do,” said the small person. “I hardly think there’s anything, in the stinging profession, wearing six legs, that’s got quite such a sharp, long, ready to-use stinger as a Black German bee. By gravy! they can ping you to the liver, and when about three of ’em takes you on the back of your neck and around the ears and into your arm muscles, oh, boy!”

Both hands clenched and then unclenched and were thrown outward in a wide-spreading sweep.

“When I got back to the Bee Master, I was shaking like I had a chill and I bet enough salt water was running down my face to make a good soup spoon full of salt. Because the Bee Master says every bucket of water you take from the ocean is three and a half per cent. salt, but I bet two bits I’m saltier ’an that. If I’d a-died I couldn’t a-kept