self over night. They were the most grateful pets I ever had, and
once they saved my life. They used to live in a hive I had built for
them in one corner of my room and I could go to bed and sleep with
every door in my house open, and not be afraid of robbers, because
those bees were there to protect me. One night a lion broke loose from
the Royal Zoo, and while trotting along the road looking for something
to eat he saw my front door wide open. In he walked, and began to
sniff. He sniffed here and he sniffed there, but found nothing but a
pot of anchovy paste, which made him thirstier and hungrier than ever.
So he prowled into the parlour, and had his appetite further
aggravated by a bronze statue of the Emperor of China I had there. He
thought in the dim light it was a small-sized human being, and he
pounced on it in a minute. Well, of course, he couldn't make any
headway trying to eat a bronze statue, and the more he tried the more
hungry and angry he got. He roared until he shook the house and would
undoubtedly have awakened me had it not been that I am always a sound
sleeper and never wake until I have slept enough. Why, on one
occasion, on the Northern Pacific Railway, a train I was on ran into
and completely telescoped another while I was asleep in the smoking
car, and although I was severely burned and hurled out of the car
window to land sixty feet away on the prairie, I didn't wake up for
two hours. I was nearly buried alive because they thought I'd been
killed, I lay so still.

"But to return to the bees. The roaring of the lion disturbed them,
and Jang buzzed out of his hive to see what was the matter just as the
lion appeared at my bed-room door. The intelligent insect saw in a
moment what the trouble was, and he sounded the alarm for the rest of
the bees, who came swarming out of the hive in response to the
summons. Jang kept his eye on the lion meanwhile, and just as the
prowler caught sight of your uncle peacefully snoring away on the bed,
dreaming of his boyhood, and prepared to spring upon me, Jang buzzed
over and sat down upon his back, putting his sting where it would do
the most good. The angry lion, who in a moment would have fastened his
teeth upon me, turned with a yelp of pain, and the bite which was to
have been mine wrought havoc with his own back. Following Jang's
example, the other bees ranged themselves in line over the lion's
broad shoulders, and stung him until he roared with pain. Each t