NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 4 59 
with wliom he lives. ' Sir, he worships his lees. After hrakfast 
he'll set and watch them, and I be forced to take his dinner out 
to him. He doesn't like his bees to die — can't bear to hear the 
sound of death ; but he likes anybody else's to die. When you 
were stung, he laughed heartily, and said "it wasn't no 
use for anybody to keep them spitefid bees ; he didn't do that 
himself." He rings anybody's bees with a pot-lid and key, but 
won't hive them himself. He coaxes 'em out, and calls 'em, " Come 
along, little fellows, come along, little fellows." 
" His father, Luke Todman, was a very exact and religious 
man ; one brother who was in the Life Guards died. ' Father 
went and waked the hives ; ' he said : — 
" Awake, little bees, awake, 
Your old master's dead, and a new one you must take." 
" 'You must ivake (confer. Irish wake) the bees before 
the sun rises next morning after the death. If they are not told 
of the death of their master the bees pine away and die. Harry 
Prior's first wife died and her bees with her ; Harry never told 
them, and he never had any since. He never waked them ; and 
since that he went shares with Master Blunden, at Eogate, in a 
hive of bees^ and he died, and the bees were never waked, and 
they died.' 
" People certainly seem to get inured to the bee-poison after a 
time, as sailors, from practice, do not feel musquitos, but per 
contra suffer much from the fleas on land Nerve will enable 
people to do almost anything with bees, but if it flags for a 
moment you will receive, as I know to my cost fourteen years 
ago, many stings at once. Is it possible that some are so thick- 
skinned that the sting cannot penetrate; or that the virtue of 
being sting-proof is like immunity from some fever poisons, a 
peculiarity handed down from ancestors, 
" It is certain that White's idiot-boy could have felt nothing 
of the sting of a bee. 
" I have little doubt that the idiot in question had a skin too 
thick for the bees' stings, and that the bees knew it. Bees know 
in a moment when you begin to fear them — you communicate 
your panic to them, and they stiletto you to their own death, 
disembowelling themselves. 
" I have for nearly twenty years kept bees, and beyond mere 
rule of thumb handling of them am satisfied that I know next 
to nothing about them, but can only echo, ore rotundissirao, 
" apibus quanta experientia parcis," 
A magnificent work has lately been published in French — (J. 
