"Oh yes, they do," continued Ben Gile, with a twinkle in his eye; "ask Lizzie." Lizzie was looking at the palm of her hand, which showed how badly it had been stung. "Now, you see, we'll need something to pick up these little creatures with--a pair of forceps or something of that kind. At least, you must be very careful." "And what else do we need?" asked the children. "A little hand lens will magnify the small parts of an insect a great deal. It will show you all the tiny hairs on the body, and the little rings and the feelers and the facets of the eyes, and many another wonderful thing." "What are we going to put the bugs in?" inquired Jimmie. "Lizzie will get you a small wooden box," said Mrs. Reece. Lizzie went off grumbling something about guides and bites and insects, but soon she came back with a nice box, and in a minute all the children's heads were clustered about Ben Gile as he showed them how to line the box with a layer of cork, how to steam the insects a little if they were dry, and then how to put the long, slender pins through the chest of the insect and stick it into the cork. III THE LITTLE ARMY Ben Gile shook his head. As his hair was long and white, and his hands moved with his head, just as if he were a lot of dried branches moving in the wind, it was enough to frighten little Betty. "Plagues of Egypt! Plagues of Egypt!" he kept muttering. Now, Betty had been to school a long time--I think it must have been as much as two whole years, which is a very _long_ time for school and a very _short_ time for climbing trees--now, Betty had been to school and knew better. She crept behind a big beech-tree, but she stuck her little head out and said, in a trembling voice: "It was locusts, sir, wasn't it--and wild honey?" Betty wasn't at all certain that any kind of honey could be a plague. "It was locusts, child--yes, you're right," answered the old man. "Locusts it was; but you eat wild honey." Betty came out from behind the tree and whispered, "You eat them _both_?" "So men did in the Bible," said Ben Gile, and washing his sugar-pails, and putting his maple sugar camp--a very sweet place for a little girl to be when there are still piles of maple sugar packed away on the shelves--in order for the summer.