exclaims one in compromise with all the others. Every echo is full of a lonesome sadness. The musical baying of a distant dog by night accentuates the depth and darkness and stillness; the crowing of cocks from farm to farm, in their cordon of sentinelship against the invasion of the dawn, tells the hearer how all too well the world is getting on without him; the lowing of kine through the clear noon air comes robbed of roughness, in its deep, mellow sonority, like the oboe and bassoon, full of a penetrating pathos. Let Nature but interpose a sheet of water or a bit of wood, and the merriest joy-bells that ever rang are infused with that melancholy which is the overplus of rapture. But there is no distance to lend that enchantment to the buzzing of a bee: it is close about us, a universal sibilation; the air is made of it; it sings of work, that joy and privilege,--of a home, of plenty, of a world whose color and odor make one giddy with good cheer; it may have many varying elements, but its constant is content. "When the south wind, in May days, With a net of shining haze, Silvers the horizon wall, And, with softness touching all, Tints the human countenance With a color of romance, And, infusing subtile heats, Turns the sod to violets, Thou, in sunny solitudes, Rover of the underwoods, The green silence dost displace With thy mellow breezy bass." And although this burly rover is not our little bee of the hive, but his saucy, sonsy country-cousin, the song of the one is scarcely sweeter than that of the other, while they blend into rarest unison. And well may both be sweet, it is such a pleasant thing to live; there is the hive to furnish, there is the dear nest underground; they forget yesterday's rain, to-morrow's frost is but a dim phantasm,--the sun is so warm to-day on their little brown backs, and here is such store of honey. It is true, the humble-bee is much the most dazzling,--he has the prestige of size, moreover; but the other may find some favor in his new bronze and gold armor and his coarse velvet mantle,--there are few creatures that can afford to labor in half such array as that, but when the work is so nice one's dress must correspond: it would never do to rumple round among the rose-leaves, black as a beetle, and expect not only to be heaped with delicates, but to be intrusted with love-tokens. One cannot be so splendid as the moths and sphinxes, who have nothing to do all summer but to lay eggs among the petals that their offspring may devour them; no, there is work to be done. But though one toils, one has a dignity to maintain; one remembers it readily when he has been made the insignia of royalty, when kings have worn his effigy, when popes have put him in their coats-of-arms; one cannot forget that he has himself been called the Winged Pontiff of the Flowers. See him now, as he hovers over the clover, not the red kind,--for him each floret of