THE PASTORAL BEES. 



a couple are married the attendants place honey in 

 their mouths, by which they would symbolize the 

 hope that their love may be as sweet to their souls 

 as honey to the palate. 



It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priest- 

 ess whose breasts distilled honey ; and that once when 

 Pindar lay asleep the bees dropped honey upon his 

 lips. In the Old Testament the food of the promised 

 Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much 

 doubt about the butter in the original), that he might 

 know good from evil ; and Jonathan's eyes were en- 

 lightened by partaking of some wood or wild honey : 

 "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been en- 

 lightened, because I tasted a little of this honey." 

 So far as this part of his diet was concerned, therefore, 

 John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the wilderness, 

 his divinity school-days in the mountains and plains 

 of Judea, fared extremely well. Abo.ut the other 

 part, the locusts, or, not to put too fine a point on it, 

 the grasshoppers, as much cannot be said, though 

 they were among the creeping and leaping things the 

 children of Israel were permitted to eat. They were 

 probably not eaten raw but roasted in that most 

 primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground made hot by 

 building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have 

 been served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said 

 to season their meat with honey. At any rate, as the 

 locust is often a great plague in Palestine, the prophet / 

 in eating them found his account in the general weal, 

 and in the profit of the pastoral bees ; the fewer lo- 



