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 
