THE PASTORAL BEES 23 



sugar, and modern confectionery is poison beside it. 

 Beside grape sugar, honey contains manna, mucilage, 

 pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous sub- 

 stances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of 

 ■wild natural bread added. The manna of itself is 

 both food and medicine, and the pungent vegetable 

 extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the 

 excretions, and dissolves the glutinous and starchy 

 impedimenta of the system. 



Hence it is not without reason that with the an- 

 cients a land flowing with milk and honey should 

 mean a land abounding in all good things; and the 

 queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the 

 kitchen to eat "bread and honey" while the "king 

 was in the parlor counting out his money," was 

 doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said 

 to have rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. 

 The Emperor Augustus one day inquired of a cen- 

 tenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and 

 body so long; to which the veteran replied that it 

 was by "oil without and honey within." Cicero, in 

 his "Old Age," classes honey with meat and milk 

 and cheese as among the staple articles with which 

 a well-kept farmhouse will be supplied. 



Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean 

 countries, appear to have been famous lands for 

 honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and Mount 

 Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of 

 antiquity, an article doubtless in no wise superior to 

 our best products. Leigh Hunt's "Jar of Honey " is 

 mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature, 



