The Reverend put a hand upon my arm to stop me. ‘I can hear something else,’ he said. ‘A dandelion, did you say? Then she will come straight for it.’ And as he spoke, I heard the old familiar sound too. It was a hive-bee, tempted abroad by the glad spring sunlight. She came straight over the meadows. Passing all other blossoms by, she settled on the single flower half-hidden in its whorl of ragged green leaves close beside us, and forthwith began to smother herself in its yellow pollen. ‘And there she goes again!’ said the old vicar, as the soft, rich sound mingled once more with the myriad other notes about us. ‘High up into the air—doesn’t she?—making ever a wider and wider circle until she gets her first flying-mark, and then in the usual zigzag course, home to the hive! A bee-line! People always make the words stand for something absolutely straight and direct. But a true bee-line is the easiest way between two points, not necessarily the shortest. To take a bee-line, if folk only knew it, is just to fly through the calmest, or most favouring airs, judge the quickest way between all obstacles, dodge the ravenous tits and sparrows, and so get home safe and sound to the hive.’ IV This spring, the Artletts have built their lambing-pens on the sunny slope of Windle Hill in full view of the village. When, at threshing-time last autumn, the waggons toiled up the steep hillside with their shuddering loads of yellow straw, and the ricks were fashioned end to end in a curving line against the north, strangers wondered why a farmer should carry his bedding-down material so far from its main centres of consumption, the stables and cowsheds. But the reason for the work is clear enough at last. Behind the solid rampart of straw, the lambing-pens lie in cosy shelter, and every day now sees them more populous; day and night, as the month wends on, there arises from them a fuller and fuller melody. Alone, perhaps, of all other rural occupations, shepherding remains unaffected by the avalanche of machinery and chemistry which has descended upon agriculture. Here and there may be found a flockmaster who talks of shearing-machines, but it is rare to find anything but the old hand-clippers in use by the old-fashioned, wandering gangs of shearers. Flocks are larger, and so bring the modern shepherd more anxious care; but in all essential ways, his year’s round of work is the same as in that time of old when the shepherds watched their flocks by night near Bethlehem. [Picture: ‘Springtime’]