For the small sum of one dime Master Middlerib agreed to procure several, to-wit: six bees, age not specified; but as Mr. Middlerib was left in uncertainty as to the race, it was made obligatory upon the contractor to have three of them honey, and three humble, or, in the generally accepted vernacular, bumble bees. Mr. Middlerib did not tell his son what he wanted those bees for, and the boy went off on his mission, with his head so full of astonishment that it fairly whirled. Evening brings all home, and the last rays of the declining sun fell upon Master Middlerib with a short, wide-mouthed bottle comfortably populated with hot, ill-natured bees, and Mr. Middlerib and a dime. The dime and the bottle changed hands. Mr. Middlerib put the bottle in his coat pocket and went into the house, eyeing everybody he met very suspiciously, as though he had made up his mind to sting to death the first person that said "bee" to him. He confided his guilty secret to none of his family. He hid his bees in his bed-room, and as he looked at them just before putting them away, he half wished the experiment was safely He wished the imprisoned bees didn't look so hot and cross. With exquisite care he submerged the bottle in a basin of water, and let a few drops in on the heated inmates, to cool them off.

over.

At the tea table he had a great fright. Miss Middlerib, in the artless simplicity of her romantic nature, said: "I smell bees. How the odor brings up-"

But her father glared at her, and said, with superflu ous harshness:

"Hush up! You don't smell anything."

Whereupon Mrs. Middlerib asked him if he had aten anything that disagreed with him, and Miss Mid

dlerib said: " 'Why, pa!" and Master Middlerib smiled as he wondered.

Bedtime came at last, and the night was warm and sultry. Under various false pretenses, Mr. Middlerib strolled about the house until everybody else was in bed, and then he sought his room. He turned the night-lamp down until its feeble rays shone dimly as a death-light.

Mr. Middlerib disrobed slowly-very slowly. When at last he was ready to go lumbering into his peaceful couch, he heaved a profound sigh, so full of apprehension and grief that Mrs. Middlerib, who was awakened by it, said if it gave him so much pain to come to bed, perhaps he had better sit up all night. Mr. Middlerib checked another sigh, but said nothing and crept into bed. After lying still a few moments he reached out and got his bottle of bees.

It was not an easy thing to do, to pick one bee out of a bottle full, with his fingers, and not get into trouble. The first bee Mr. Middlerib got was a little brown honey-bee that wouldn't weigh half an ounce if you picked him up by the ears, but if you lifted him by the hind leg as Mr. Middlerib did, would weigh as much as the last end of a mule. Mr. Middlerib could not repress a groan.

"What's the matter with you?" sleepily asked his wife. It was very hard for Mr. Middlerib to say; he only knew his temperature had risen to eighty-six all over, and to one hundred and ninety-seven on the end of his thumb. He reversed the bee and pressed the warlike terminus of it firmly against his rheumatic knee.

It didn't hurt so badly as he thought it would.
It didn't hurt at all!

Then Mr. Middlerib remembered that when the

honey-bee stabs a human foe it generally leaves its harpoon in the wound, and the invalid knew then the only thing the bee had to sting with was doing its work at the end of his thumb.

He reached his arm out from under the sheet, and dropped this disabled atom of rheumatism liniment on the carpet. Then, after a second of blank wonder, he began to feel around for the bottle, and wished he knew what he had done with it.

In the meantime strange things had been going on. When he caught hold of the first bee Mr. Middlerib, for reasons, drew it out in such haste that for the time he forgot all about the bottle and its remedial contents, and left it lying uncorked in the bed. In the darkness there had been a quiet but general emigration from that bottle. The bees, their wings clogged with the water. Mr. Middlerib had poured upon them to cool and tranquilize them, were crawling aimlessly about over the sheet. While Mr. Middlerib was feeling around for it, his ears were suddenly thrilled and his heart frozen by a wild, piercing scream from his wife.

"Murder!" she screamed, "murder! Oh, help me! Help! help!"

Mr. Middlerib sat bolt upright in bed. His hair stood on end. The night was very warm, but he turned to ice in a minute.

Where, oh, where," he said, with pallid lips, as he felt all over the bed in frenzied haste, " where in the world are those confounded bees?”

And a large "bumble," with a sting as pitiless as the finger of scorn, just then alighted between Mr. Middlerib's shoulders, and went for his marrow, and said valmly: "Here is one of them."

And Mrs. Middlerib felt ashamed of her feeble screams when Mr. Middlerib threw up both arms, and with a howl that made the windows rattle, roared:

"Take him off! Oh, land of Scott, somebody take him off!"

Miss Mid

And when a little honey-bee began tickling the sole of Mrs. Middlerib's foot, she shrieked that the house was bewitched, and immediately went into spasms. The household was aroused by this time. dlerib, and Master Middlerib and the servants, were pouring into the room, adding to the general confusion, by howling at random and asking irrelevant questions, while they gazed at the figure of a man, a little on in years, pawing fiercely at the unattainable spot in the middle of his back, while he danced an unnatural, weird jig by the dim light of the night-lamp. And while he danced and howled, and while they gazed and shouted, a navy-blue wasp, that Master Middlerib had put in the bottle for good measure and variety and to keep the menagerie stirred up, and who had dried his legs and wings with a corner of the sheet, after a preliminary circle or two around the bed, to get up his motion and settle down to a working gait, fired himself across the room; and to his dying day Mr. Middlerib will always believe that one of the servants mistook him for a burg lar and shot him.

No one, not even Mr. Middlerib himself, could doubt that he was, at least for the time, most thoroughly cured of rheumatism. His own boy could not have carried wimself more lightly or with greater agility. But the cure was not permanent, and Mr. Middlerib does not like to talk about it.

R. J. BURDETTE.

JEHOSHAPHAT'S DELIVERANCE.

JEHO

II Chronicles xx.

EHOSHAPHAT reigned over Judah in peace; The land lay in quiet and teemed with increase; For righteousness ruled from the cot to the throne, And Judah rejoiced in Jehovah alone.

For, Baal's base worship once hurled from God's land,
Prosperity poured from His liberal hand;

The law was revered and the Temple restored,
And Salem shone bright in the smile of her Lord.

Then came a swift message of terror and fear:
Lo, Moab, and Ammon, and Edom from Seir,
Have swarmed from the desert, a numberless host,
To pillage our cities and plunder our coast!

A black cloud of evil, a whirlwind of fate,
One day's rapid march from Jerusalem's gate;
Like locusts they light upon Judah's fair realm!
Like demons descend to devour and o'erwhelm!

Then trembling Jehoshaphat feared and proclaimed A fast for all Judah; and sacrifice flamed,

And Judah's strong warriors, with children, and wives,
In the house of Jehovah implored for their lives.

"Lord God of our fathers, in Heaven adored,
Thou rulest on earth, our Omnipotent Lord;
Fierce kingdoms of heathen obey Thy command!
The might of Thy majesty none can withstand!