Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember— “The Bittern, with his bump, The crane, with his trump,” and Chaucer’s single line, “And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.” This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee. 1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.