AFTER THE FEAST 255 
coming back to the old leafy nook of the country, 
find thé old green hive still in its corner under 
the lilac, still the centre of what seems the same 
crowd of winged merchant-women sailing home 
under the same gay colours, singing the old glad 
songs, building the old wondrous fabrics in the 
darkness, transmuting the same fragrant essences 
into the same elixir of gold. And what is this 
mysterious thing called the Bee-Commonwealth, 
which is alone immortal, while all that composes it, 
and pertains to it, and upholds it, passes and dies ? 
You must not forget the queen-bee here. She 
alone, it must be remembered, persists year in 
and year out, while generation after generation 
of her children grow up and die about her—a 
hundred thousand of them, may-be, in each twelve- 
month, thousands even between one single summer 
dawn and the dusk of the western sky. Methu- 
salah of old, on the more moderate human scale, 
must have had some such experience—must have 
divined the broader plan of life from the incessant 
repetitions of chance and change that passed before- 
him. The power to generalise into symbols comes 
only to the ancient of days ; and he of all men had 
learnt to fathom, to estimate, to winnow out the 
sober drab grain from the glittering, rainbow chaff 
of life. Over and over again he must have kept 
the true true to itself with one wise word, and 
turned back the false, dazzled and discomfited, 
with one flash from his mirror of the ages. He 
