"A HONEY THIEF, ILL MAY HE THRIVE."--_Page 55._--Every Bee keeper will echo this wish. I know no sight more piteous than an apiary the night after it has been plundered. Light Hives upset, and lying, with the combs all broken, on the ground. The Bees crawling about in wild confusion around their violated homes, lately so neat, and now the very picture of desolation. In vain they attempt to repair the damage which the spoiler's hand has created; whilst the stands where the heavy stocks stood the evening before, are one and all tenantless. Many devices to protect Hives from robbers have been tried. Wooden boxes are tightly screwed to the bottom board from below, whilst the bottom board itself is strongly bolted to the stand. This will indeed protect a hive from anything but a powerful crow bar. But the remedy is worse than the disease, as it prevents your ever changing or cleaning the bottom board, and is, in many ways, inconvenient. The best preservative I can think of is to have a savage dog, savage to all but his master, with a strong chain, not fastened to his kennel, but ending in an iron ring, which can slide along a small pole placed horizontally about a foot from the ground in front of the Hives. I have seen this mode of defence adopted in Germany for the protection of the valuable Leech ponds, which are there fattened for the market. It answers for the defence of Leeches, and if so, why not for Bees. "MANY A NOSE, UPTURNED, WAS SNORING IN REPOSE."--_Page 66._--My readers will doubtless remember, as I confess to have done when penning the above line, the opening of Southey's Thalaba, and the inimitable parody thereof in the Rejected Addresses. When a thing has been done excellently well, it is folly to again attempt the same with a certainty of failure before our eyes. We verse makers do not steal from each other; we are all one brotherhood, and _Corbies nae pike out corbies e'en_. But we convey--_conveys_ the word, says glorious Will. "AND BETWEEN THEM BORE, "THE FELON TO THE PRISON DOOR."--_Page 66._ This mode of removing a captive would have suited that extinct species of our protective force, that of the Dogberry and Verges order, and may be recommended to our new police as more merciful, and less grating to the feelings of a prisoner than the present mode of "running a man in;" especially as they generally get hold of the wrong person. A police sedan would enable the innocent captive to conceal his features from the tail of little boys and idle quidnuncs, specially if he were carried like our honey thief head downwards. The last Chapter is like the first, written in the style of the Butterfly's Ball and the Grasshopper's feast, and is, it seems to me, no less admirable. If I pride myself on anything in this translation it is on the concluding lines: