He chuckled as he spoke for it was a well-known joke in the household that Master Simon, although equal to any other emergency that might arise, could not come in too great haste to call Mistress Radpath, once the bees swarmed. He took the hive from her now and bent to kiss the successful bee-mistress before he went to put it in place beneath the apple-trees. “Goody Parsons says I shall never have true skill until I learn to whisper charms and spells over the hives, as she does,” returned Mistress Radpath. “She says—but oh, my spinning, I shall never have it done!” She went quickly into the house, leaving Master Simon to set the hive in its place at the end of the long row that stretched across the back of the garden. Some of the hives, those that had been brought from England, were trim and blue-painted, the others were roughly framed out of wood cut in the forest. It chanced that the one just put into place was the best and most elaborate of all, for it had a pane of glass in its side through which one could see the newcomers already turning to the work that would result in the building up of a golden honeycomb. Margeret, her anger almost forgotten now, slipped across the grass and stood at her father’s side, watching too. As she came near he murmured to himself a line that she had heard him quote before: “The singing masons, building roofs of gold.” “Father,” she said, putting her hand into his and speaking hesitatingly, as she was not quite sure how she would be received, “what do those words mean and where did you first hear them?” She was quite astonished when, for answer, Master Simon burst into a hearty laugh. “My child,” he said, “that is almost the very question that was asked me forty years ago by my elderly Aunt Matilda of whom I was that moment thinking. And with that scowl upon your face, you look not unlike the severe dame herself as she asked it.” “Ah, tell me about it,” begged Margeret, the scowl disappearing and the last of her anger quite swept away. She loved her father’s stories, especially those that had to do with his boyhood and that fierce and redoubtable Aunt Matilda. Master Simon turned to the bench under the linden tree, at the edge of the little enclosed garden, and took her upon his knee. “And so,” he queried, “that gust of temper is all gone by and you are willing to be friends with your father and mother again? What was it that put you into such a sudden passion? I did not know that you hated so to spin.” “It was not just the spinning,” returned Margeret, hanging her head. “It was because I was weary of working so much and being so dull and sober. It was because”—here was so terrible a confession that she could scarce bring it forth—“because I did not like to be a Puritan maid and did not want to be good.” Her father only laughed and held her close.