HONEY-CRAFT OLD AND NEW ) 197 
There are no mysteries now in honey-craft. 
Science has dragooned the fairies out of sight and 
hearing as a man treads out sparks in the whin. 
But, though the mysteries have gone, the old music 
of the hives is still here as sweet as ever. This 
morning, when the sun was but an hour over the 
hilltop, I rose from my bed, and, coming down the 
creaking stair through the silence and half-darkness, 
threw the heavy old house-door back. At once the 
level sunshine and the song of bees and birds 
came pouring in together. There was the loud 
humming of bees in the leafing honeysuckle of the 
porch, and the soft low note of the hives beyond. 
In its plan to-day Warrilow Bee-farm reveals the 
whole story of its growth from times long gone 
to the present. All the hives near the cottage are 
old-fashioned skeps of straw, covered in with three 
sticks and a hackle. A little way down the slope 
the ancient bee-boxes begin, eight-sided Stewartons 
mostly, with the green veneer of decades upon 
some of them. Beyond these stand the first rack- 
frame hives that ever came to Warrilow; and thence, 
stretching away down the sunny hillside in long 
trim rows, are the modern frame-bar hives, spick 
and span in their new Joseph’s coats of paint, with 
the gillyflowers driving golden shafts between 
them, until they reach the line of sheds—comb and 
honey-stores, extracting-house, and workshops— 
marking the distant lane-side. 
The Water-carriers 
As I stood in the doorway, caught by the mesmeric 
sheen of the light and the beauty of the morning, the 
