The little girl had just seen her father go past the door with his gardening tools on his shoulder and had been planning to follow and help him work among the flowers in the warm June sun. It was a pleasant day of clean-washed air and fresh salt breezes, one that she could scarce bear to think of spending within doors. She obeyed her mother very reluctantly, brought her wheel from its corner and sat down to spin. Her fingers were clumsy and her temper short so that in a moment she had tangled her thread and jerked the treadle so roughly that it snapped. Her mother’s look of mute reproach was more than she could bear. “I care not at all,” she cried loudly and bitterly. “I wanted to break the hateful wheel. Little girls must play sometimes!” So saying, she rushed out of the door slamming it to behind her. She saw Master Simon standing on the path, looking gravely and sorrowfully after her, but she did not give him time to speak. Taking refuge behind the great hawthorn bush she buried her face in the grass and burst into hot, angry tears. After she had cried for some time and had, in part at least, washed away her wrath, she sat up to look about her and to wonder how, after all, she could have been so wicked. Across the meadow, filled with bobolinks, she could look down to the harbour where the full June tide was running in. A little boat, sailed she knew by Roger Bardwell, the shoemaker’s apprentice, in such moments as he could steal from his harsh master, was flying joyously before the gay, warm wind. She could sniff a bewildering sweetness that filled the air, for the linden tree had bloomed the day before, driving Mistress Radpath’s bees nearly mad with joy. She had heard them humming in the branches nearly the whole night through and to-day again their song was loud in her ears. Indeed, as she listened, the buzzing and whirring grew so insistent that she began to realise something had happened. “Why,” she exclaimed, “I believe that they are swarming.” Leaving her refuge behind the hawthorn bush, she peeped over the hedge of the little enclosed garden where the sundial stood and where the peacock had once dwelt. Yes, there beyond, under the apple trees stood her mother, with eager eyes and cheeks pink with excitement, as she held up the new hive and sought to lure the bewildered bees within. The air seemed full of their black whirring little bodies, which bye and bye, however, gathered close and finally settled in a huge dark mass, hanging from the linden tree like some strange, gigantic fruit. Then must Mistress Radpath exercise all her wiles, find the queen-bee and persuade her to enter the hive, to be followed at last by her train of black, buzzing courtiers. “Now that was as skilfully managed as ever I saw it!” exclaimed Master Simon. “Scarce could I have done better myself.”