HIGH LIFE. 91 



and Tenterden Steeple. But, like the amateur stories 

 in country papers, it is ' founded on fact,' for all that. 

 (Imagine, by the way, a tale founded entirely on fiction ! 

 How charmingly aerial !) By a roundabout road, 

 through varying chains of cause and effect, the rarity of 

 the air does really account in the long run for the beauty 

 and conspicuousness of the mountain flowers. 



For bees, the common go-betweens of the loves of the 

 plants, cease to range about a thousand or fifteen 

 hundred feet below snow-level. And why? Because 

 it's too cold for them ? Oh, dear, no : on sunny days 

 in early English spring, when the thermometer doesn't 

 rise above freezing in the shade, you will see both the 

 honey-bees and the great black bumble as busy as their 

 conventional character demands of them among the 

 golden cups of the first timid crocuses. Give the bee 

 sunshine, indeed, with a temperature just about freezing- 

 point, and he'll flit about joyously on his communistic 

 errand. But bees, one must remember, have heavy 

 bodies and relatively small wings : in the rarefied air of 

 mountain heights they can't manage to support them- 

 selves in the most literal sense. Hence their place in 

 these high stations of the world is taken by the gay and 

 airy butterflies, which have lighter bodies and a much 

 bigger expanse of wing-area to buoy them up. In the 

 valleys and plains the bee competes at an advantage with 

 the butterflies for all the sweets of life : but in this broad 

 sub-glacial belt on the mountain-sides the butterflies in 

 turn have things all their own way. They flit about like 

 monarchs of all they survey, without a rival in the world 

 to dispute their supremacy. 



