BEE-KEEPING AND THE SIMPLE LIFE 275 
carried for sale. The bee-master put an admiring 
hand upon it. 
“Tt was all Hetty’s idea,” he said. “London 
girls for pluck, you know! And she goes into the 
town with it once a fortnight in the season ; takes 
it away crammed full, mind, and never brings back 
an ounce! Somehow or other, I think those girls 
ought to change names !” 
Journeying back to the railroad-station under 
the eternal English sunshine and through the chain 
of blossoming fields, I listened to the chant of the 
bees around me; and though it was the familiar 
sound of a lifetime, there was something in it then 
which I had never heard before. The rich note 
rose and fell; died down to silence as the path led 
through impregnable red-clover ; swelled again as 
the land paled to the rosy hue of the sainfoin ; burst 
out ifttova loud, glad symphony where a patch of 
charlock blent its despised, uncoveted gold with 
the farmer’s drill. ‘You thought you knew our 
ways of life from Alpha to Omega’—so seemed 
to run, in fancy, the wavering refrain. ‘“ You have 
pried upon us day and night, in season and out of 
season. You have chloroformed us, vivisected us, 
torn our dead sisters limb from limb to feed the 
cruel, glittering eyes of that binocular of yours. 
You have come at last to think that there was 
nothing about us, within or without or round about, 
that you had not got to know. And here a common 
18—2 
