THE PASTORAL BEES 17 



some fifty rods in advance of me. Lining them as 

 well as I could, I soon reached the hilltop, my breath 

 utterly gone and the perspiration streaming from 

 every pore of my skin. On the other side the coun- 

 try opened deep and Avide. A large valley swept 

 around to the north, heavily wooded at its head and 

 on its sides. It became evident at once that the 

 bees had made good their escape, and that whether 

 they had stopped on one side of the valley or the 

 other, or had indeed cleared the opposite mountain 

 and gone into some unknown forest beyond, was 

 entirely problematical. I turned back, therefore, 

 thinking of the honey-laden tree that some of these 

 forests would hold before the falling of the leaf. 



I heard of a youth in the neighborhood more 

 lucky than myself on a like occasion. It seems that 

 he had got well in advance of the swarm, whose 

 route lay over a hill, as in my case, and as he 

 neared the summit, hat in hand, the bees had just 

 come up and were all about him. Presently he no- 

 ticed them hovering about his straw hat, and alight- 

 ing on his arm; and in almost as brief a time as it 

 takes to relate it, the whole swarm had followed the 

 queen into his hat. Being near a stone wall, he 

 coolly deposited his prize upon it, quickly disengaged 

 himself from the accommodating bees, and returned 

 for a hive. The explanation of this singular circum- 

 stance no doubt is, that the queen, unused to such 

 long and heavy flights, was obliged to alight from 

 very exhaustion. It is not very unusual for swarms 

 to be thus found in remote fields, collected upon a 

 bush or branch of a tree. 



