Little House In The Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder Page A

to wear an old gray coat, All buttoned down before.
    “Old Grimes's wife made skim-milk cheese, Old Grimes, he drank the whey, There came an east wind from the west, And blew Old Grimes away.”
    “There you have it!” said Pa. "She was a mean, tight-fisted woman. If she hadn't skimmed all the milk, a little cream would have run off in
    the whey, and Old Grimes might have staggered along.
    "But she skimmed off every bit of cream, and poor Old Grimes got so thin the wind blew him away.
    Plumb starved to death."
    Then Pa looked at Ma and said, “Nobody'd starve to death when you were around, Caroline.”
    “Well, no,” Ma said. “No, Charles, not if you were there to provide for us.”
    Pa was pleased. It was all so pleasant, the doors and windows wide open to the summer evening, the dishes making little cheerful sounds together as Ma washed them and Mary and Laura wiped, and Pa putting away the fiddle and smiling and whistling softly to himself.
    After a while he said, "I'm going over to Henry's tomorrow morning, Caroline, to borrow his grubbing hoe. Those sprouts are getting waist-high around the stumps in the wheat-field. A man just has to keep everlasting at it, or the woods'll take back the place."
    Early next morning he started to walk to Uncle Henry's. But before long he came hurrying back, hitched the horses to the wagon, threw in his ax, the two washtubs, the wash-boiler and all the pails and wooden buckets there were.
    “I don't know if I'll need 'em all, Caroline,” he said, “but I'd hate to want 'em and not have 'em.”
    “Oh what is it? What is it?” Laura asked, jumping up and down with excitement.
    “Pa's found a bee tree,” Ma said. “Maybe he'll bring us some honey.”
    It was noon before Pa came driving home.
    Laura had been watching for him, and she ran out to the wagon as soon as it stopped by the barnyard. But she could not see into it.
    Pa called, “Caroline, if you'll come take this pail of honey, I'll go unhitch.”
    Ma came out to the wagon, disappointed.
    She said:
    “Well, Charles, even a pail of honey is something.” Then she looked into the wagon and threw up her hands. Pa laughed.
    All the pails and buckets were heaping full of dripping, golden honeycomb. Both tubs were piled full, and so was the wash-boiler.
    Pa and Ma went back and forth, carrying the two loaded tubs and the wash-boiler and all the buckets and pails into the house. Ma heaped a plate high with the golden pieces, and covered all the rest neatly with cloths.
    For dinner they all had as much of the deli-cious honey as they could eat, and Pa told them how he found the bee tree.
    “I didn't take my gun,” he said, "because I wasn't hunting, and now it's summer there wasn't much danger of meeting trouble. Panthers and bears are so fat, this time of year, that they're lazy and good-natured.
    "Well, I took a short cut through the woods, and I nearly ran into a big bear. I came around a clump of underbrush, and there he was, not as far from me as across this room.
    "He looked around at me, and I guess he saw I didn't have a gun. Anyway, he didn't pay any more attention to me.
    "He was standing at the foot of a big tree, and bees were buzzing all around him. They couldn't sting through his thick fur, and he kept brushing them away from his head with one paw.
    "I stood there watching him, and he put the other paw into a hole in the tree and drew it out all dripping with honey. He licked the honey off his paw and reached in for more.
    But by that time I had found me a club. I wanted that honey myself.
    “So I made a great racket, banging the club against a tree and yelling. The bear was so fat and so full of honey that he just dropped on all fours and waddled off among the trees. I chased him some distance and got him going fast, away from the bee tree, and then I came back for the wagon.”
    Laura asked him how he got the honey away from the bees.
    “That was easy,” Pa said. “I left the horses back in the woods,