258 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



by, and nothing is done. Here and there a wide- 

 awake husbandman gets a little township of hives 

 together, sells in the neighbourhood all the honey 

 his bees make, and puts to his pocket a gold and 

 silver lining. But this is only a drop in the ocean, 

 and the British people must send abroad for their 

 honey, which they do to the pretty tune of more 

 than ^30,000 a year. 



Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to 

 cause, it would seem that farming has been re- 

 munerative only when undertaken on a large scale; 

 but those who can read the signs of the times tell 

 us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, 

 will be the age of the small man. And this must 

 mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops 

 — wheat, oats, barley — will slowly give place to 

 little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made 

 to produce, not the things that tradition and our 

 yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all 

 and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble 

 necessities for which each town and village should 

 look to the good brown earth immediately about it, 

 but at present looks in vain. Farmers' ladies may 

 then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride 

 in their carriages, but that will be a change for the 

 simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in 

 towns have little conception of it; but the country- 

 dweller knows well what complexity and luxury 

 have got into the old English farmhouses, for all 

 the outcry about hard times ; how the farmer's 



