"The Lard be praised!" cried Mrs. Birkin, seizing the baby. "That there lamb ’ll be lucky an’ good-lookin’, an’ she’ll ’ave a good ’usban’ for sure. Bless ’er! Them bees knows what they be about, an’ ’tis plain they knew as you was Cotsal barn an’ bred, an’ wasn’t none of them faintin’, scritchin’ women as don’t rekkerni’ze the Lard’s voice, not when ’E ’ollers in their yer." Then, seated on the little wooden seats on each side of the tiny porch, the women proceeded to sing the size and the exceeding beauty of the new baby, who seemingly preferred the soothing lullaby of the bees, for she woke up and "hollered" with surprising vigour. A little later the baby paid her visits to Mrs. Birkin in a fine, white perambulator, and, as that worthy woman put it, "You didn’t know where you was" before that remarkable infant toddled up the cobbled path to the cottage quite unassisted. Time slips by noiseless and fleet-footed in a quiet Cotswold village, even as in noisier and more strenuous places, and "Squoire’s little darter" grew into "our young lady." To be sure, there were other young ladies in the neighbourhood, for the village is large and cheery, with many nice places around; but the other young ladies were in no way remarkable. No swarm of bees had settled on any of them in infancy. For it really seemed as if some of the sturdy sweetness of the bees had passed into the baby they thus honoured. As was said of jolly Dick Steele, "she was liked in all company because she liked it." And now the village was upside down with excitement, for our young lady was going to be married, and Mrs. Birkin was to have a new bonnet for the great occasion. Mrs. Birkin felt that she had an unusually important part to play in the festivities attendant on this great event, for our young lady’s father, who had an excellent memory for dates, had decreed that the wedding-day should be on the anniversary of the day on which, nineteen years before, the swarm of bees had distinguished his daughter. Such a thing had never happened since, though plenty of babies had come both to Mrs. Birkin’s village and the other villages round about, and you may be sure that Mrs. Birkin knew all about every baby that arrived within a ten-mile radius. She is an authority upon babies. She is one of those women who is everybody’s mother because she has no living children of her own. In the churchyard, under the green mound that now marks the humble resting-place of Mr. Birkin, there were once two tiny graves, where, side by side, lay Mrs. Birkin’s twin sons. And for the sake of those two babies, dead these forty years, Mrs. Birkin’s heart had kept young and kind, and full of love for all other babies. So that it came about that the very crossest infant ever born into a world it seemed to find singularly unattractive was good with Mrs. Birkin, and in consequence she was in great request with busy mothers.