MANAGEMENT OP OUT-APIARIES 55 



bees is over till another year. A sort of sadness steals over me, and 

 I fall to wondering if both bees and myself will be alive to work so 

 happily together another year. The merry hum and the fragrance from 

 the hives, which greeted me when coming to the yard during the summer, 

 greet me no more. I find myself wishing it were spring again, and 

 that I were just commencing the fun of working the out-apiary for 

 another year. I seem to see the bees at work again as they did on those 

 bright "clover and basswood" moms. It seems like a real living picture 

 again — a picture fairer than thought; a picture fairer than a dream; a 

 picture with ten thousand pearls glistening in earth's rarest sunlight, on 

 one stretch of verdure green, and reaching out beyond the winter's vale 

 to the bright spring again, when the butterfly begins to flutter in the 

 pleasant breeze, and the joyous children are chasing after sunbeams. 

 Thus I dream. As I have been musing, the clouds have parted in the 

 low west, and the setting sun has dropped down into the clear space 

 between them and the horizon, throwing over hill and vale ten thousand 

 times ten thousand glittering hues that glow and shine to beautify the 

 landscape and cheer the heart of man. Dawn tiptoes over the mountain 

 tops, and peeps 'into the valley far below with eager, tender eyes, while 

 darkness gathers up her sable robes to skulk and hide away in the 

 crevices and mountain caves; but in the evening come the long light sun- 

 rays, beautiful, to gild the world and gladden it with kisses, lovelier, 

 sweeter far than the rarest, gentlest kiss of dawn. So, too, the evening 

 tide of life may gxow more beautiful and blest, if life is rightly lived, 

 believing upon Him who was and is the light and life of men. And the 

 bees, now in the evening tide of 1905, are enjoying a rest sweeter by far 

 than their restless sleep during the dawn of their activity, six months ago. 

 "Hello there! Gone to sleep?" comes in stentorian tones from my 

 farmer landlord, and I am aroused to the fact that it is fully time that 

 I be on my journey home. 



CHAPTER XI. 



It is now October 10, and one of those beautiful clear days with 

 enough of smoke and the haze in the atmosphere to give a balmy air, which 

 makes one of our fall days in New York so delightful. The leaves, which 

 are soon to fall from the trees, all gorgeously arrayed in their many-dyed 

 hues, are made more enchanting to the eyes by being "kissed" by the 

 morning sunshine — surely a splendid day for an auto ride ;and, to com- 

 bine pleasure with profit, Mrs. D. and myself are soon traveling at an 

 easy "pace" toward the out-apiary, breathing the beautiful ozone of an 

 autumn day, and feasting our eyes on the ever varying changes in the 

 landscape before us. We go on a roundabout road, instead of the direct 

 one usually traveled, so as to see new scenes; but even this, with the 

 gait of the auto so slow that I,' the driver, need not be very closely confined 

 to the chauffeur part of the matter, causes us to arrive at our destination 

 all too soon. Mrs. D. goes in to have an agreeable hour with the farmer's 

 wife, while I hie away to the bee-yard, the most delightful spot in the 

 world to me except my home, the Sunday-school, and the church of the 

 Lord Jesus Christ. 



