Page:Under the Sun.djvu/255

Rh not throw in their teeth, as some have done, the conduct of those she-bears of Judea, who avenged the touchy prophet by desolating the nurseries of all the countryside, for that was a miracle over which the she-bears had no control. Nor would I give credence to Daniel, when he takes the bear as an emblem of faithlessness; nor to the libellous narrative of Gesner, who tells us how bears make a practice of stealing young women; nor yet would I admit in evidence the mocking eulogies of Ælian. Pliny and Aristotle are of course to be discredited, and we must therefore come to modern times to find the bear justly judged. The delightful La Fontaine speaks of it as a blundering friend, and points the moral by the story of the bear who, wishing to brush away the fly that disturbed its master’s slumbers, accidentally knocked off the top of its master’s skull; and Artemus Ward tells us how it can be taught to do “many interestin’ things, but is onreliable.”

But, after all, this is no excessive disparagement, and within the moderate limits of justice.

Among the stories which have delighted children of all countries, and probably from all time, is one that tells how certain evil-minded men went to steal a widow’s pig, but how they found a bear in the sty instead, and how thereupon disaster, sudden and complete, overtook the robbers.

No child ever doubted the truth of that story; indeed how could it be doubted? It is well known that widows do as a fact frequently keep a pig, and where should they keep it but in a sty? Again, thieves are notoriously given to stealing, and what could be more advantageously purloined than a pig, — above all a pig belonging to a