AUTOCRAT OF THE BEE-GARDEN 191 
can bee-keeping be anything else than a kind of 
walking-tower in a furrin land, when every twist 
an’ turn o’ the way shows something eur’ous or 
different? ” 
He stopped to recharge his pipe from the 
earthen tobacco-jar, shaped like an old straw bee- 
hive, which had yielded solace to many a past 
generation of the Warrilow clan. 
“°Tis just this matter of sex,’’ he continued, 
“that these book-writing bee-masters seem to leave 
altogether out of their reckoning. And yet it lies 
well to the heart of the whole business. In an 
average prosperous hive there are about thirty 
thousand of these little stunted, quick-witted 
worker-bees, not one of which but could have 
grown into a fully-developed mother-bee, twice the 
size, and laying her thousands of eggs a day, if 
only her early bringings-up had been different. But 
“nature has doomed her to be an old maid from her 
very cradle, although she is born with all the 
instincts and capabilities for motherhood that you 
wonder at in a fully grown, prolific queen. And 
yet the bee-masters expect her to accept her fate 
without a murmur; to live and work to-day just as 
she did yesterday and the day before; to tend and 
feed patiently the young bees that she has been 
denied all part in producing; to support a lot of 
lazy drones in luxury and idleness; and generally 
to act like a reasonable, contented, happy creature 
all the way through.” 
He took three or four long, contemplative pulls 
at his Broseley clay, then came back to his subject 
and his dialect together. 
“°?Tis no wonder,” said he, ‘‘that the little 
