commotion. At last, when she one morning made a plunge
at the skirts of my new broadcloth frock coat, and carried off one
flap on her horns, my patience gave out, and I determined to sell
her.

As, however, I had made a good story of my misfortunes among my
friends and neighbors, and amused them with sundry whimsical accounts
of my various adventures in the cow-catching line, I found, when I
came to speak of selling, that there was a general coolness on the
subject, and nobody seemed disposed to be the recipient of my
responsibilities. In short, I was glad, at last, to get fifteen
dollars for her, and comforted myself with thinking that I had at
least gained twenty-five dollars worth of experience in the
transaction, to say nothing of the fine exercise.

I comforted my soul, however, the day after, by purchasing and
bringing home to my wife a fine swarm of bees.

"Your bee, now," says I, "is a really classical insect, and breathes
of Virgil and the Augustan age,--and then she is a domestic, tranquil,
placid creature. How beautiful the murmuring of a hive near our
honeysuckle of a calm, summer evening! Then they are tranquilly and
peacefully amassing for us their stores of sweetness, while they lull
us with their murmurs. What a beautiful image of disinterested
benevolence!"

My wife declared that I was quite a poet, and the beehive was duly
installed near the flower plots, that the delicate creatures might
have the full benefit of the honeysuckle and mignonette. My spirits
began to rise. I bought three different treatises on the rearing of
bees, and also one or two new patterns of hives, and proposed to rear
my bees on the most approved model. I charged all the establishment to
let me know when there was any indication of an emigrating spirit,
that I might be ready to receive the new swarm into my patent
mansion.

Accordingly, one afternoon, when I was deep in an article that I was
preparing for the "North American Review," intelligence was brought me
that a swarm had risen. I was on the alert at once, and discovered, on
going out, that the provoking creatures had chosen the top of a tree
about thirty feet high to settle on. Now my books had carefully
instructed me just how to approach the swarm and cover them with a
new hive; but I had never contemplated the possibility of the swarm
being, like Haman's gallows, forty cubits high. I looked despairingly
upon the smooth-bark tree, which rose, like a column, full t