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The Keeper of the Bees

and displeased, but it did not. It smiled on the roadway and the mountain-side on which it looked with exactly the same serene, placid smile of invitation that it always wore for him. He tried its doors, but they were all locked. He looked in the window, but he could see nothing except that the trunk was standing in the middle of the living room and the wardrobe of the young lady seemed to be mostly draped over the Bee Master’s chair. He decided that this would be a good time to work Margaret Cameron’s garden, so he went over and turned on the hose. He was busy there when he heard the light padding of beach shoes behind him and turned to face the little Scout.

“Oh, hello! How’s everything?”

“How’s everything at your end of the line?” parried Jamie.

“Fine!” said the little Scout. “I’m doin’ all those things that I told you I’d do for our partnership baby. He’s going to be an awful nice baby. Mother’s crazy over him. She cuddles him up and takes care of him edzactly like she did Jimmy, but she ain’t much stuck on this bottle business. She says it’s an awful nuisance to fix the bottle, and she says it’s an awful pity that any baby should have to lose its mother because she says that a baby, when it’s a little thing like that, gets more from its mother than just milk. She says it gets a steady stream of love. She says that a baby that lies on its mother’s breast and looks in her eyes and lays one little hand on her neck, gets with its food something that it knows about all its life. She says it tain’t natural and it tain’t right