1883 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



95 



lur tcrgm- 



Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him— Job 

 13:15. 



^IPY friends, I have a sad story to tell you 

 Jwl to-day; and yet out of its very sad- 

 — ness I trust we may find a useful les- 

 son. You have heard me speak of our 

 Canadian boys, and have doubtless known 

 that one of them has had charge of the apia- 

 ry principally, for the past two years. He 

 came here to learn bee culture, while his 

 brother, older, remained to care for the bees 

 at home in Canada. It is of this one that I 

 would speak. Some of you may remember 

 a bright, hopeful letter that he wrote in our 

 Sept. No., 1:81. If you have the number 

 handy, it may be worth your while to turn 

 to page 42-1. At the close of his letter we 

 tind these words:— 



Now, friend Root, I can hear you saj'," Very good, 

 friend C; but, go caretully; go slowly at first till 

 you get experience." I promise you 1 will be care- 

 ful, for I guess I know what care it has taken to put 

 that little apiary in its present shape; yes, to build 

 it up from nf)thing in six months; but to go slowly, 

 never I 1 have a great many faithful advisers on 

 this point, and I would say to all such who may read 

 these lines, that, with all due respect for your good 

 wishes and greater experience, "Please before you 

 say further, come right here and step into my 

 shoes." I have lived a quiet country life on my 

 father's farm for twenty years; but that life is at an 

 end now, and time is precious; time is money, edu- 

 cation, influence, every thing, and time is short. 



There is nothing especially peculiar in the 

 above, and the feeling he expresses there 

 might be shared by many a young man of 

 twenty ; but, as nearly as we can well decide 

 now, it appears that that letter was written 

 when he was on the eve of insanity. A few 

 weeks later his brother became so alarmed 

 at the strange tone of his letters, that he 

 showed them to me, and finally, by my advice, 

 he went back to Canada and brought the 

 writer, A. E. Calvert, here. We thought if 

 we could get him here among our boys and 

 girls we might, with God's help, lift him 

 out of the despondency into which he seem- 

 ed settling. For a time we seemed to part- 

 ly succeed, and he took hold of our work, 

 and was apparently one of us ; but toward 

 spring he seemed to settle back, and finally 

 wrote a letter to John, who brought it to 

 me. The letter was one of the saddest ac- 

 counts of struggles with despondency and 

 despair that one could well imagine. I saw 

 him alone with his brother, and had a long 

 talk with him about it. He insisted that 

 his mind was gone, and that it was too late 

 for him to be helped. He thought if he had 

 come among us sooner, perhaps he might 

 have been helped out of his trouble ; but he 

 continually insisted that it was too late. He 

 said in his letter that he thanked his shop- 

 mates for the courteous way in which they 

 treated him, but that they clid it only out of 

 kindness and politeness, for it must be ap- 

 parent to everybody, as well as himself, 

 that he had not ordinary intelligence. I 

 told him, it was only a moinjmania he had 

 fallen into, and that his powers of mind 

 were unimpaired, and no one thought of 

 such a thing. I plead and argued the mat- 

 ter with him, and took him by his great 



broad shoulders and told him he had 

 strength of mind, and body too, to do a 

 world of good in encouraging and cheering 

 others, instead of settling down to brood 

 over imaginary evils. I scolded him for 

 giving way to temptation, and, with his 

 consent, burned the letter and got a partial 

 promise from him that he would not yield 

 again to temptation, so far as to write any 

 more in that strain ; and before I left him 

 he knelt in prayer and asked God to help 

 him to overcome the temptation to yield to 

 these evil thoughts, and to deliver him from 

 the dark cloud that threatened to envelop 

 his whole life, and to give him faith to say, 

 " Thy will, not mine, be done." From that 

 night on he seemed to begin to rise up ; 

 but as a further precaution I asked him to 

 come up into my room every Wednesday 

 evening, and tell me of his temptations, and 

 we would, with God's help, surely bring 

 him out all right. These meetings were 

 kept up for many weeks, or until I felt 

 he was in comparative safety. As I no- 

 ticed still that he had a fashion of relapsing 

 into a sort of gloom, or reading in a sort of 

 mechanical way, hour after hour, John and 

 I thought it would be well to give him some 

 work to occupy his mind; and accordingly 

 he was employed for several months in till- 

 ing orders for goods that were to go by ex- 

 press. After the busy season was over he 

 helped in building our new house ; and 

 toward fall I was rejoiced to know that 

 both of the boys had decided to go back 

 with Ernest to Oberlin to school. It seem- 

 ed to me that Oberlin was the place of all 

 places to get one to feel that life is worth 

 living for, even for those in humble circum- 

 stances. He took hold of his studies well, 

 learned easily, and made unusual progress ; 

 and when he came home at the holiday va- 

 cation I inwardly thanked God that Albert 

 had been, so far as I could see, raised from 

 the dreaded fate that seemed at one time to 

 hang over him. Even though he seemed so 

 safe, I determined to have, at the first op- 

 portunity, a good long talk with him in re- 

 gard to his old malady, and find out whether 

 he had been subject to his old despondent 

 moods any more. I once went over to his 

 room in the new house, for this express pur- 

 pose ; but as he was busy talking with oth- 

 ers, I let it pass. No opportunity offered, 

 and the day came for them to go back to 

 college. For a trifling reason they neglected 

 to take the morning train, and so the boys 

 were sitting around through the day, not 

 doing much of any thing. It was almost 

 train time, and we were taking supper rath- 

 er earlier in the lunch-room, that the boys 

 might not be late for the train. Albert had 

 been around within an hour, so w^e sat down 

 without him. After we had partly finished 

 our meal, I remarked,— 



" Why, it seems strange that Albert 

 should be away so long, when it is so near 

 train time." 



The others made some comment, and Ja- 

 cob remarked that he saw him a little while 

 before, going into the house apiary. John 

 arose hastily and went out; but if I saw it, 

 I thought nothing of it. In a few moments 

 more I was startled and stunned by the sud- 



