CHAPTER V 
A BEE-MAN OF THE ’FORTIES 
THE old bee-garden lay on the verge of the wood 
Seen from a distance it looked like a great 
white china bowl brimming over with roses; but a 
nearer view changed the porcelain to a snowy barrier 
of hawthorn, and the roses became blossoming apple- 
boughs, stretching up into the May sunshine, where 
all the bees in the world seemed to have for- 
gathered, filling the air with their rich wild chant. 
Coming into the old garden from the glare of the 
dusty road, the hives themselves were the last 
thing to rivet attention. As you went up the shady 
moss-grown path, perhaps the first impression you 
became gratefully conscious of was the slow dim 
quiet of the place—a quiet that had in it all the 
essentials of silence, and yet was really made up 
of a myriad blended sounds. Then the sheer 
carmine of the tulips, in the sunny vista beyond the 
orchard, came upon you like a trumpet-note through 
the shadowy aisles of the trees; and after this, in 
turn, the flaming amber of the marigolds, broad 
zones of forget-me-nots like strips of the blue sky 
fallen, snow-drifts of arabis and starwort, purple 
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