CURE BY Y E TOUCH. 419 



divine grace within him, he possessed an unlimited power of 

 healing. 



What could be more delightful than such a right royal 

 announcement at any time, the more especially at a time 

 when medicine and surgery were both so barbarous 1 Bene- 

 vole lector, if you should tell me that you could change my 

 own gray hair to raven black by stroking it with your hand, 

 why need we waste words about it? I might, without im- 

 putation of high treason, say nay. Why should I say nay ? 

 Lifting my hat, I would bid you come and do it. When 

 kings and queens began to heal by imposition of hands and 

 stroking, they had formed no consistent theory of the ratio 

 medendi. It is natural for the human mind to invest persons 

 in authority with exalted attributes. Probably no ruler of 

 men was ever spoken of during life by subjects as not being 

 stamped with some sort of excellence beyond that of the 

 governed. What happens in the empire of bees seems to 

 have prompted the notion. 



A queen-bee is obviously different from a common bee 

 handsomer, bigger, every way more majestic. She bears im- 

 printed on her front and figure the stamp of heroism unmis- 

 takable. Notwithstanding this profound physical difference 

 between her majesty the queen-bee and her subjects the 

 common bees, her majesty, as good old blind man Huber 

 satisfactorily made out, was a common bee once, only having 

 risen to the physical majesty of queendom through sheer 

 force of refined diet.* It might be worth while to try whether 

 something similar to the physical exaltation wrought by at- 

 tention to diet on bees might not be effected upon young 

 people in legitimate succession to thrones. Had rulers of 

 men been endowed with a distinct heroic cast of form and 



* If by any accident a queen-bee dies, a successor, equal to her in every 

 respect, of heroic stature and bearing, is manufactured out of a common 

 bee, which, being walled into a special apartment, and fed on a particular 

 sort of food, is thereby metamorphosed into a queen-bee. 



