One day we met a splendid specimen of our family whom we soon discovered to be none other than our father--the consort of our dear mother, now deceased. He received us fairly well; but my veneration for the paternal relative suffered a rude shock when he informed my brother and sister and myself that, with every desire to be a good father to us, he could not permit us to trespass upon a certain oat-field which he declared did not contain any more than he absolutely required for his own subsistence. He made some sympathetic remarks as to mother's death, with his mouth full of delicious ripe oats, and then bade farewell of us (meaning _us_ to go--he evidently had no intention of leaving the field!), remarking, cordially enough, that he would always be glad to see us, and to hear of any favourable feeding-grounds we might come across, if large enough for all, "but never mind your old father if rations are scarce!" he added. I never saw my parent again. Very shortly after the day upon which he warned us off that oat-field, which--by the way--_we_ had discovered, he actually permitted himself to be driven away from its precincts by a mere peasant-human armed with an axe. I fancy my father must be a very inferior person compared with my good brave mother. _She_ would have behaved very differently towards that peasant--we should undoubtedly have had him for supper: oats, peasant, and honey; a supper of three courses fit for the gods. But for a member of the family of Ursidæ to be ignominiously chased away from an oat-field by a peasant--oh! dear me--disgraceful! disgraceful! II Well, it was a grand time for us, that first summer. How we grew and fattened! By the early part of the autumn, we were really quite respectable-sized members of the community. About this time we lost our brother Vainka. It was an exciting thing, rather, and I will note down the story in full. It was like this. We were all three busily engaged in breakfasting among the tall stems of a rye-field, near a village, when we observed several human children playing about in an adjoining belt of pasture-land. There were no grown men present, so far as we were aware, and we determined to amuse ourselves, and at the same time to piously observe the injunctions of our dear mother deceased, by doing our best to frighten the brats out of their wits, and, if possible, injure them besides; we were too small, as yet, to do them any very serious harm; in fact, they were rather bigger, I think, than we.