learing away the
chips as usual when I was lowered to the bottom, I swayed back and
forth and began to sink under the poison. Father, alarmed that I did
not make any noise, shouted, "What's keeping you so still?" to which
he got no reply. Just as I was settling down against the side of the
wall, I happened to catch a glimpse of a branch of a bur-oak tree
which leaned out over the mouth of the shaft. This suddenly awakened
me, and to father's excited shouting I feebly murmured, "Take me out."
But when he began to hoist he found I was not in the bucket and in
wild alarm shouted, "Get in! Get in the bucket and hold on! Hold on!"
Somehow I managed to get into the bucket, and that is all I remembered
until I was dragged out, violently gasping for breath.

One of our near neighbors, a stone mason and miner by the name of
William Duncan, came to see me, and after hearing the particulars of the
accident he solemnly said: "Weel, Johnnie, it's God's mercy that you're
alive. Many a companion of mine have I seen dead with choke-damp, but
none that I ever saw or heard of was so near to death in it as you were
and escaped without help." Mr. Duncan taught father to throw water down
the shaft to absorb the gas, and also to drop a bundle of brush or hay
attached to a light rope, dropping it again and again to carry down pure
air and stir up the poison. When, after a day or two, I had recovered
from the shock, father lowered me again to my work, after taking the
precaution to test the air with a candle and stir it up well with a
brush-and-hay bundle. The weary hammer-and-chisel-chipping went on as
before, only more slowly, until ninety feet down, when at last I struck
a fine, hearty gush of water. Constant dropping wears away stone. So
does constant chipping, while at the same time wearing away the
chipper. Father never spent an hour in that well. He trusted me to sink
it straight and plumb, and I did, and built a fine covered top over it,
and swung two iron-bound buckets in it from which we all drank for many
a day.

The honey-bee arrived in America long before we boys did, but several
years passed ere we noticed any on our farm. The introduction of the
honey-bee into flowery America formed a grand epoch in bee history.
This sweet humming creature, companion and friend of the flowers, is
now distributed over the greater part of the continent, filling
countless hollows in rocks and trees with honey as well as the
millions of hives prep