The long, cold winter of 1870, which froze all the fowls except the six sad roosters, and followed the failure of the potato and corn crops, was also disastrous to the bees. The hives had increased to a fine long row in the years that followed the capture of the first swarm discovered by Tumbler, the bear, and the honey had been a welcome addition to the soldiers' simple fare; but the cold weather had destroyed every swarm, leaving only bee-bread and some half-consumed old combs from which the dead bees had fallen in a dry mass upon the bench below. While Coleman and Bromley were engaged in planting, Philip was making an effort to find a new bee-tree. He had noticed some bees buzzing about the wild flowers on the ridge by the old flagging-station, and he determined to "line" them by a method he had seen his uncle practise when he was a boy in Ohio. He made a little box with a sliding cover, into which he put a small honeycomb, and taking the old yellow rooster under one arm for company,--or perhaps for luck,--he went over to where the flowers grew near the northern end of the plateau. He set down the old rooster on the ground, and opened the box on a stone in front of him, and waited, watching his bait. It was something like fishing in the old mill-pond, of which he had once been fond, and he found a singular fascination about watching the opening in the box as he used to watch his bobber. The June weather on the mountain was like May in the Ohio valley, and the sweet smell of the flowers carried his mind back to his old home. He had no longer to wait for the first nibble than he had waited in the old days for the first stir of his cork and the spreading ring on the water. A bee lighted on the lid and then made his way down into the box. After loading his legs with honey, the bee reappeared, and rising into the air, flew away to the south. Philip followed the small insect with his eyes, and then, picking up the old rooster, he came on for a hundred yards in the same direction, and set his bait as before. This time he had two bees in his box, and when they had loaded themselves they flew away in the same direction as the first. They disappeared so soon above the tree-tops that he thought the swarm was not far away; but every time he advanced, the loaded bees continued to fly south, until he had moved the paralyzed old rooster by easy stages the whole length of the plateau; and the bees, which came in greater numbers now, rose into the air and flew in a "bee-line" over the top of the southern cliff. Philip was disgusted at this result of his bee-hunt, as any fisherman, after wading to his middle in a cold river to humor a fine trout, might be, to lose his victim at last in the foaming rapids; but he knew to a certainty that there was a bee-tree somewhere beyond the thus far unscalable southern cliff.