There are many common things of the country-side—small facts to be learned for the trouble of a glance—which are little known because the glance is seldom given. As I passed along the hedge where the teasels stood up straight as a row of church spires, the glitter of the water in their leaf-cups caught my eye, and I stopped to look at them. I had always thought of the teasels as natural drinking-places for the bees, and other flying or creeping things; but now I saw that their use was very different. Studying the plant carefully, the whole meaning of the thing dawned on me at last. The teasel must be a flesh-eater, more greedy and destructive than any spider in the land. In the cups a host of creatures lay drowned; and upon the green, translucent leaves and stems there crawled multitudes of others, all destined for the same fate. There were in the water not only small insects, but bumble-bees, large caterpillars and slugs, even broad-winged night-moths that had fallen to the teasel’s snare. I saw also that the pools of water insulating every stem served not as traps alone, but actually as digestive cells, wherein the carcases of the teasel’s prey were gradually resolved into the slime that lay at the bottom of each cup. Somehow, I conjectured, this must be absorbed into the tissue of the plant; and cutting one of the stems asunder, just where the water-holding leaves embraced it, I came upon what seemed proof of this—a ring of apertures at the base of each cup—sink holes, in fact—leading into the substance of the stem. The path wound up a hill-side over a field of tares, rippling away before me through the sea of purple blossom until it ended abruptly against the blue sky far above. And here another minute wonder brought me to a halt. Though it was so early, the hive-bees were out and about in their thousands. The great field was besieged by them. The air throbbed with their music. A madness for honey-making seemed upon them all; and yet, of all the busy thousands upon thousands set loose amidst what seemed illimitable forage-ground, nowhere could I see a hive-bee upon a flower. I went down on hands and knees for a closer view, believing at first that my eyes were playing false with me. But there was no doubt about it. Though on every side the great furry bumble-bees were seizing upon, and dragging open the purple blooms of the tares, the hive-bees never touched these, for all they were in so huge a heat and flurry of work. Now I knew that, while every other insect under heaven has its times of relaxation, deeming moments given over to dancing in a sunbeam or basking on a wall as moments not ill-spent, the honey-bee allows herself no such wasteful delights. If she were here in this tare-field in her thousands, and here she was, she came for no other purpose than a useful one. Clearly, therefore, the hive-bees were getting nectar in abundance: yet how, if they were not seeking it in the flowers?