CHAPTER IV 



AT THE CITY GATES 



IN a village in Southern Sussex, close under the 

 green brink of the Downs, there live two bee- 

 keepers who represent, in their widely diver- 

 gent methods and outlook, the extremes of bee- 

 manship as still extant in modern times. 



The one dwells in a little ancient thatched 

 cottage, set in the heart of an old-fashioned English 

 garden, where dome-shaped hives of straw are 

 dotted about at random amidst a wild growth of the 

 old-fashioned English flowers. The other has 

 built himself a trim villa on a hillside, topped 

 with a sheltering crest of pine-wood ; and here he 

 has established a great modern honey-farm, replete 

 with every device and system of management 

 known to apiarian scientists throughout the two 

 worlds. 



One might suppose, on leaving the village 

 street on a fine May morning and coming upon 

 these two settlements in the open country beyond, 

 that all the romance and old-world flavour of 

 bee-keeping were inevitably to be found in the 



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