Carting the Bees 161 



getting smothered, or of the honey running and 

 drowning them. 



At first everything goes pleasantly ; the road is 

 smooth, the horses fresh. Much bee-talk is spoken : 

 talk of giant swarms, of prodigious tops of flower 

 honey, of runaway hives charmed back with the music 

 made with a pair of tongs and a frying-pan ; of 

 adventures in the old time, when the journey was 

 made on foot or with ' a cuddy and creels' ; of mishaps 

 on the road ; and how one year horses were stung so 

 that they jumped over a precipice and killed all who 

 were with them, and how more than once the ' maut 

 has got aboon the meal,' and horses and men have when 

 daylight came found themselves lost in a bog. But 

 after awhile the smooth Roman road has to be aban- 

 doned, and the going becomes worse and worse. At 

 last it is only a rut through the fields, and boys and 

 men are shaken and jolted as the wheels rise over 

 immense stones or sink into deep holes. When 

 morning breaks the carts are crawling along a stony 

 road on the side of the green Cheviots wooded with 

 birch and fir to the tops of which the drifting clouds 

 seem tied with waving threads of mist. The cart-rut, 

 overgrown with heather and bracken, passes by the side 

 of a tiny burn which now seems but a series of mossy 

 stones with a clear pool at intervals, yet will be big 

 enough by-and-by. Until about the year 1878, when 

 the last of them fell a prey to the bird-stuffer, golden 

 eagles might have been seen in the early morning 



M 



