The more I see of this world the hollower I find everybody. I don\'t mean that people haven\'t got their insides in them, but they are so dreadfully ungrateful. No matter how kind and thoughtful any one may be, they never give him any credit for it. They will pretend to love you and call you "Dear Jimmy what a fine manly boy come here and kiss me," and then half an hour afterwards they\'ll say "Where\'s that little wretch let me just get hold of him O! I\'ll let him know." Deceit and ingratitude are the monster vices of the age and they are rolling over our beloved land like the flood. (I got part of that elegant language from the temperance lecturer last week, but I improved it a good deal.)

There is Aunt Eliza. The uncle that belonged to her died two years ago, and she\'s awfully rich. She comes to see us sometimes with Harry—that\'s her boy, a little fellow six years old—and you ought to see how mother and Sue wait on her and how pleasant father is when she\'s in the room. Now she always said that she loved me like her[Pg 90] own son. She\'d say to father, "How I envy you that noble boy what a comfort he must be to you," and father would say "Yes he has some charming qualities" and look as if he hadn\'t laid onto me with his cane that very morning and told me that my conduct was such. You\'ll hardly believe that just because I did the very best I could and saved her precious Harry from an apple grave, Aunt Eliza says I\'m a young Cain and knows I\'ll come to the gallows.

She came to see us last Friday, and on Saturday I was going bee-hunting. I read all about it in a book. You take an axe and go out-doors and follow a bee, and after a while the bee takes you to a hollow tree full of honey and you cut the tree down and carry the honey home in thirty pails and sell it for ever so much. I and Tom McGinnis were going and Aunt Eliza says "O take Harry with you the dear child would enjoy it so much." Of course no fellow that\'s twelve years old wants a little chap like that tagging after him but mother spoke up and said that I\'d be delighted to take Harry, and so I couldn\'t help myself.

We stopped in the wood-shed and borrowed father\'s axe and then we found a bee. The bee wouldn\'t fly on before us in a straight line but kept lighting on everything, and once he lit on Tom\'s hand and stung him good. However we chased the bee lively and by-and-by he started for his tree and we ran after him. We had just got to the old[Pg 91] dead apple-tree in the pasture when we lost the bee and we all agreed that his n............