As Twinkly Eyes, the little Black Bear, heard that buzzing from the wild rose bushes, he forgot his troubles with the Jay.

Indeed, he fairly danced for joy. For had he not been waiting greedily all spring for the sound of a honey bee?

Now he would find the bee tree, and feast on honey to his heart’s content! For of all the good things in the great green woods—mice and berries and grubs, and fish and frogs, and sour-tasting little red ants, to say nothing of juicy roots, and the nuts of autumn—he loved nothing half so well as honey.

He had had a taste just once, but he had never forgotten!

While wrestling with his brother one day the spring before, when they were three months cubs, their mother had suddenly called them to follow and trailing straight after a bee her sharp ears had discovered, she led them to a hollow tree where the yellow comb lay in great fragrant chunks.

Twinkly Eyes licked his chops at the memory. Then Mother Black Bear had shown them how to hide their noses and shut their eyes when the bees came too near these unprotected places. Otherwise the angry insects could try as hard as they would, and they could not reach through the glossy fur.

Twinkly Eyes had escaped without a sting and he had decided in his infant mind that Mother was altogether too cautious for any use.

This year Mother Black Bear had a new set of cubs to teach and train, and Twinkly and his brother were living in bachelor quarters.

A moment Twinkly watched, and then the bee had all the honey she could carry. Buzzing happily, she started back through the woods toward an open glade on the other side of Pollywog Pond.

Twinkly followed, his sharp ears guiding him where his little near-sighted eyes could not, till his eager sniffings brought to his nostrils the first faint fragrance of the bee tree.

Now other bees began to join the first one, till there was quite a little swarm headed for a hollow pine—a great, gaunt tree that had been hollowed out by lightning and now stood, scarred and blackened, on the top of a hillock.

“It’s a pretty good world, after all,” Twinkly Eyes decided, as he ambled up the slope.