44 My Garden Summer-Seat. 



mutually destructive. But then it is very easy to con- 

 demn the poor egg-layer. What worse is she than the 

 human weakling who has a great secret and shows that 

 he has it, forgetting that very wise warning Goethe 

 makes Wilhelm Meister give his boy, that to keep a 

 secret you must be careful to hide that you have one. 



Bees of all kinds daily visit me. The common 

 humble-bee and sometimes the moss or carder-bee, 

 the " foggy-toddler " of Scottish boys, and a peculiarly 

 long, thin, black bee, with the faintest tip of red on 

 its tail, and at times clouds of my neighbour's hive 

 bees mix with my own — giving evidence that there 

 are some Ligurians imported. Last year they accom- 

 plished an odd feat. I had brought some beans of 

 a very fine kind from Belgium. The beans are pure 

 white and in long pods which run up poles as high as 

 hops or even higher; not far off were some scarlet 

 runners, of both of which the bees were very fond. 

 One half of the plants grown from my pure white 

 Belgian seed yielded a cross — not pure white, but 

 speckled as if with the colour of the scarlet-runner 

 bean — and the pods were not nearly so long and flat 

 as in the Belgian bean. It was at all events quite 

 a new variety, never before seen in the district. The 

 wild-flowers near my garden-seat particularly attract 

 them. By what secret magnetism is it that they know 

 when any new species is in bloom, and come simul- 

 taneously to it, as it were, from the four winds of 

 heaven ? But, in spite of little contretemps of this 

 kind, I can heartily say, with that sweet American 

 poetess, Miss Celia Thaxter, whose eye for nature 

 is as keen as her love for it is passionate, when in 

 her beautiful poem titled " Guests," she celebrates, as I 

 do, her — 



