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Sometimes a spray of purple flowers could be seen among the trees, and great patches of sunlight which, here and there, came through the thinning foliage, fell, now upon the brilliantly scarlet leaves of a sweet-gum, and now upon the polished and brown-red dress of a neighboring black-gum. The woods were very quiet.

Her lap was full of autumn leaves-maple and gum, flaming and variegated, brown oak of various shapes and shades, golden hickory, the open burrs of the chintuapin, pine cones, and the dun scraggly balls of the black-gum, some glowing bunches of the flame-bush, with their wealth of bursting red beries, and a full-laden branch of the black-haw.

Of course, on the same direct line this one went for wild bees thus captured and set at liberty abandon all desire for further work, and in a panic rush headlong to their hive; in this way the wild hives are found. But the fourth very soon swerved upward into the branches of a hollow black-gum tree.

He knew flower, plant, bush, and weed, the bark and leaf of every tree, and even In winter he could pick them out in the gray etching of a mountain-side dog-wood, red-bud, "sarvice" berry, hickory, and walnut, the oaks white, black, and chestnut the majestic poplar, prized by the outer world, and the black-gum that defied the lightning. All this the dreamy stranger had taught him, and much more.

There were the oaks the black-oak with its shining many-pointed leaves, the white-oak with its lighter green though duller-hued foliage, and the chestnut-oak with its long and thickly clustered leaves. Then there were the sweet-gums, fragrant and star-leaved, and the black-gum, tough, dark, and unpretending.

But they're to stay there until some of those black-gum trees begin to glut the market with yellow clings and Japanese plums. I reckon we can't count on them unless we take Luther Burbank in for a partner. "'Very well, says Bassett, 'we'll do the best we can. Maybe after dark I'll borrow a hairpin from some lady, and open the Farmers and Drovers Marine Bank with it.

An hour later the black-gum tree came ripping, crashing to earth. The intelligence, or instinct, of the bee has furnished inspiration for many pens. Centuries prior to Maeterlinck, even before Pliny, Virgil, Varro and Aristotle, those warmly constructed little insects, hailed by the ancients as Winged Servants of the Muses, have been immortalized.