ong.
The only fall I ever had was out of an elm.

"I ran up one in a hurry, away from that wretch, the weasel (you know
him), and put my foot on a dried branch, and the elm, like a treacherous
thing as he is, let it go, and down I went crash, and should have hurt
myself very much if my old friend the ivy had not put out a piece for me
to catch hold of, and so just saved me. As for you, dear, don't you ever
sit under an elm, for you are very likely to take cold there, there is
always a draught under an elm on the warmest day.

"If it should come on to rain while you are out for a walk, be sure and
not go under an elm for shelter if the wind is blowing, for the elm, if
he possibly can, will take advantage of the storm to smash you.

"And elms are so patient, they will wait sixty or seventy years to do
somebody an injury; if they cannot get a branch ready to fall they will
let the rain in at a knot-hole, and so make it rotten inside, though it
looks green without, or ask some fungus to come up and grow there, and
so get the bough ready for them. That elm across there is quite rotten
inside--there is a hole inside so big you could stand up, and yet if
anybody went by they would say what a splendid tree.

"But if you asked Kauhaha, the rook, he would shake his head, and
decline to have anything to do with that tree. So, my dear Sir Bevis, do
not you think any more that because a thing has no legs, nor arms, nor
eyes, nor ears, that therefore it cannot hurt you. There is the earth,
for instance; you may stamp on the earth with your feet and she will not
say anything, she will put up with anything, but she is always lying in
wait all the same, and if you could only find all the money she has
buried you would be the richest man in the world; I could tell you
something about that. The flints even----"

"Now I do not believe what you are going to say," said Bevis, "I am sure
the flints cannot do anything, for I have picked up hundreds of them and
flung them splash into the brook."

"But I assure you they can," said the squirrel. "I will tell you a story
about a flint that happened only a short time since, and then you will
believe. Once upon a time a waggon was sent up on the hills to fetch a
load of flints; it was a very old waggon, and it wanted mending, for it
belonged to a man who never would mend anything."

"Who was that?" said Bevis. "What a curious man."

"It was the same old gentleman (he is a farmer, only he is