I'm a-goin' to stifle them bees, marm, and pull out all their stingers." And the old man laughed uproariously.
Grandmother Ruth shook her head doubtfully; old Hughy's reputation for care and strict veracity was not of the best.
When I went to get ready for the jaunt grandmother charged me to be cautious and not to go into any dangerous places, and before I left the house she gave me a pair of gloves and an old green veil to protect my head.
Before starting for the woods we had to go to old Hughy's cabin to get two pails for carrying the honey and a kettle and a roll of brimstone for "stifling" the bees.

As we passed the Murch farm the old man told me that he had tried to get Willis, who stood watching us in the dooryard, to go with him to listen for the bees.

"But what do you think!" he exclaimed with assumed indignation.

"That covetous little whelp wouldn't stir a step to help me unless I'd agree to give him half the honey! So I came to git you, for of course I knowed that as noble a boy as I've heered you be wouldn't act so pesky covetous as that." Getting the tin pails, the kettle and the brimstone together with an axe and a compass at the old man's cabin, we went out across the fields and the pastures north of the Wilbur farm to the borders of the woods through which old Hughy wanted to follow the bees.
A line of stakes that old Hughy had set up across the open land marked the direction in which the bees had flown to the forest.

After taking our bearings from them by compass we entered the woods and went on from one large tree to another.