If he saw a venomous snake in the
road he would take the nearest stick and kill it, but if he found it in
bed with his children, "I might hurt the children," he said, "more than
the snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and considerate of the
south as ever he was of an erring neighbor in Illinois, where it is
remembered that he carried home with his giant strength one whom his
comrades would have left to freeze, and nursed him through the night. So
he sat almost sleepless, sad-hearted, through the four dark years, but
resolute, cheering his own heart and those about him with a broad humor
that came as "Aesop's Fables" out of the fields and their elemental
wisdoms.
One summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of that land of Lincoln, I
heard a sound of buzzing in the air and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud
against the clear sky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making their way
from a hive, they knew not where, and with an instinct born of the plains
at once I began to follow them and to throw up clods of earth to stop
their flight, bringing them down finally on the edge of the field upon a
branch of a tree, where they were at evening gathered into a new hive and
persuaded back to profitable industry instead of wasting their substance
in the forest.
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