Overhead was the sunshine, and the bees scented the breeze. Burbidge filled each bottle, and then replaced the wooden lid of each hive. "Stand back, marm!" he cried, "and you, too, Monsieur." Then Burbidge called his "boys," and they removed the little pieces of zinc that had kept the bees so long prisoners. Out they flew with exultant hums and buzzes. "They wud have liked to cut their way through," cried Absalom, "but zinc, for all their cunning, be the masters of they." "They'll be contented now," laughed Burbidge. "Sugar and sunshine, what more can a bee desire?" There is a great art in making bee syrup, like there is in doing most country things. Syrup should be clear and of the right thickness, and not too liquid; above all, it should not be too thin, so as to pass too quickly through the muslin, or, in Burbidge's words, "it would drown the bees like flies in a jar of cream." After watching the bees come out and fly round in exultant joy, Bess and I returned to the house, for, as Bess said, the "bee play" was over for to-day. How busy the little brown people will be gathering fresh honey, flying amongst the arabis and searching for celandines and primroses. We went in, and Bess ran up to her lessons. Alas! study to my little maid is always a period of sadness. "Real children never like lessons," is my little girl's dictum. They don't like useless things; and to Bess, French, geography, history, and music are all useless and worthless acquisitions. As I sat and embroidered in the Chapel Hall, I was suddenly told that a boy outside wished to speak to me. I left a carnation spray, a copy of a design of one of Mary Queen of Scots', and looked up to welcome Thady Malone, a little Irish lad, who, with his father and mother, had lately come into the parish. Thady is the terror of the locality, and the hero of all the naughty-boy stories of the neighbourhood. [Sidenote: "MORE DEVIL THAN BOY"] According to my old gardener, who looks at him with an evil eye, "Thady be more devil than boy." Burbidge declares that Thady is a plague, and a sore to the town, and "wull be the death of some 'un, unless he kills hisself first." The fact is, Thady has done every naughty thing conceivable. He has fired woods, put strings across roads, I have been told, to try and trip up his natural enemy, James Grogan, the reigning policeman, and even put logs across the little local line, I have been assured; but this he stoutly denies himself. He has been thrashed by indignant farmers for running their sheep, and yet, as Bess says, always turns up "naughty and nice," with the politest of manners, which he gets from "auld Oireland," and the sweetest and most innocent of baby faces out of which natural wickedness ever peeped.