190 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
chimney-breast about a dozen modern, paper- 
covered treatises on bee-keeping, and threw them, 
rather contemptuously, on the table. 
““T’m not saying, mind ye,’’ he hastened to add, 
“that there’s a word against truth in any one of 
them. They’re all true enough, no doubt, for they 
contradict each other at every turn. ’Tis as if one 
man said roses was white; and another said, ‘ No, 
you’re wrong, they’re yaller’; and a third said, 
‘Y’are both wrong, they’re red.’ And when folks 
are in dispute in this way, because they agree, and 
not because they differ, there’s little hope of ever 
pacifying them. 
“T heard tell once of a woman bee-keeper years 
ago, that had a good word about bees. Said she, 
‘They never do anything invariably’; and she 
warn’t far off the truth. She knew her own sex, 
did wise Mrs Tupper. Now, the trouble with the 
book-writers on bees is that they try to make a 
science of something that can never rightly be a 
science at all. They try to add two numbers 
together that they don’t know, an’ that are allers 
changing, and are surprised if they don’t arrive at 
an exact total. There’s the bees, and there’s the 
weather: together the result will be so many 
pounds of honey. If the English climate went by 
the calendar, and the bees worked according to 
unchangeable rules, you might reckon out your 
honey-take within a spoonful, and bee-keeping 
would be little more than sitting in a summer-house 
and figuring on a slate. But with frosts in June, 
and August weather in February, and your honey- 
makers naught but a tribe of whimsy, sex-thwarted 
wimunin-folk, a nation of everlasting spinsters—how 
