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Show Honeybee, he loved the bees, He always was their friend; He used to sit upon their hives But they stung-in the end! He didn't claim a lyric gift. Perhaps he adapted the jingle from Captain Billy's Whizzbang and Arkansas Thomas Cat. For later I saw it in a yellowed copy of that raffish journal with "Hezekiah" in the first line instead of "Honeybee, he." As the lucerne grew, favored by a fairly rainy spring, Father's hopes flourished. He always paid more attention to favorable signs than to discouraging ones. He decided now was the time to increase the size of the field across the track. We were too hasty prying out the staples and uprooting the fence posts on the west and north sides. There was a delay in obtaining the woven and barbed wire we needed. Factories were perhaps hurrying to fill contracts with France and England for barbed wire for World War I trenches. At any rate we dismantled half the fence around the Experiment Farm and began the big job of clearing brush from thirty more acres next to the first field. We dug postholes and set cedar posts. Although the new wire did not arrive, the jackrabbits did. In droves. My innocence as puddler was far behind me now: I was to kill off as many "jacks" as possible. Shep probably performed as valuably as I did. He rarely overtook mature rabbits, but he scared them out of the field several times a day. However, the jacks swarmed back at the first glimmer of dawn. Perhaps they worked nights. Father and I strove to erect a fence of brush. I was furnished unlimited ammunition for my .22 and dozens of No. 1 steel traps. The latter I set in the paths the rabbits trod between breaches they found and |