“Pshaw! Only a few spiders are poisonous, that is, I think so. Let’s get a library book about them and find out; then may be we’ll have a spider collection, too,” answered the practical brother. While Rob was getting his bottles ready in which to “electrocute” the bugs and Lora was going to the library after the books, Mrs. Farnum was rummaging in the attic. At last she came down bearing triumphantly aloft a big old-fashioned work-box. “This you may have for a specimen case,” she said. “If you’ll fit some little drawers in it, Rob, I’ll line them with scraps of velvet and have a glass top put on.” The children set to work at once, and in vain the neighbors’ children whistled for them on the other side of the high board fence. Lora took the hammock from the front lawn to swing beneath the old apple tree. But the tall weeds reached up to the hammock, so Rob had to go for the old scythe rusting in the fence corner and Baby Jim came dragging a hoe with which to cut them down. Soon they had a large space cleared under and around the apple trees, and when it was carefully raked and swept they ran in to beg their mother for some porch chairs for their “summer parlor.” Then Rob made for himself a camp-stool that he could carry around and plant among the bushes where he would sit watching for certain bugs to appear and trying to catch them in his bottle. Such patience as it took at first! And how little Rob had of it! But Lora read long, interesting chapters to him out of “The Insect World,” and the specimen case grew so fast and became so fascinating that he found the patience quite worth while. Whatever Rob did, of course, Baby Jim wanted to do. “The ant-hill’s mine! I ’scovered it!” he announced at supper one evening. “I’ll make a fence wound it to keep the wolves out, and I’ll have the ants for my sheepses.” Mrs. Farnum did not look as pleased as the rest. “I don’t want the ants crawling all over you,” she said. “No, they won’t; I’ll take my red chair out and sit on it, like Rob does,” he answered, solemnly. The next day he set to work to build a big circular fence around his ant hill, working as perseveringly as ever any real shepherd did to get his fold ready, and accepting no help from Rob except allowing him to shave up a board to furnish the “palings.” Then, day after day, while Lora swung in the hammock reading aloud to Rob, little Jim sat perched on his red chair herding his ant-flock. “I feed them and they eat, but they never drink a tiny bit,” he said. “The ants find their drink away down in the ground, dear,” replied his mother. “Now tell me what you have learned about your sheep.” “I learned a greedy lesson to-day,” said Baby Jim. “One ant had some food and he met an ant who hadn’t any, and he divided; then he went on some more and met another ant with not any, and he told him to come over to my chair-leg where the cookie was.”