that is deep as those shafts of the hashish-eater's dream, where the broken tubes of the honeysuckle being planted in the sand, their mouths level with the floor of the desert, they became wells, and the Arab women dropped their buckets therein and drew them up dripping with honey,--it is the small white clover on which he alights, whose sweets are within reach of his little proboscis; or, lost in that great blue-bell, he swings it with his motion and his melody; or he burrows deep in the heart of a rose, never rolling there, as it has erroneously been said, but, collecting the pollen with his pincers, swims over the flower while brushing it into the baskets of his hinder legs, and then lights again for a fresh fare, till, laden and regaled, he loudly issues forth, dusty with treasure; and _les rois fainéans_, the Merovingian kings, who powdered their heads and their beards with gold, were no finer fellows than he. But a few months' wear and tear will suffice to tarnish him; by-and-by the little body will be battered and rusty, the wings will be ragged and worn; one day as he goes home heavily burdened, if no sailing blue-winged swallow have skimmed him up long ago, the flagging flight will fail, a breeze will be too much for him, a rain-drop will dash him down, he will fall, and some garden-toad, the focal length of whose vision is exactly the distance to which he can dart his tongue, will see a tired bee blundering across his sky, and will make a morsel of him, honey-bag, pollen, and all. Yet that is in the future, far outside the focal length of any bee's vision, that fortunate vision which finds creation so fair and himself the centre of it, each rose made for him to rifle, and welcome everywhere. "The docile flower inclines and lends itself to the unquiet movements of the insect. The sanctuary that she had shut from the winds, from the sight, she opens to her dear bee, who, all impregnated with her sweetness, goes carrying off her messages. The delicious precautions that Nature has taken to veil her mysteries from the profane do not for a single moment arrest this venturesome explorer, who makes himself one of the household, and is never afraid of being the third. This flower, for instance, is protected by two petals which join each other in a dome above; it is thus that the flag-flower shelters her delicate little lovers from the rain. Another, such as the pea, coifs itself in a kind of casque, whose visor must be raised. The bee establishes himself at the bottom of these retreats fit for fairies, laid with softest carpets, under fantastical pavilions, with walls of topaz and ceilings of sapphire. But poor comparisons borrowed from dead stones! These things live and they feel, they desire and they await. And if the joyous conqueror of their little hidden kingdom, if the imperious violator of their innocent barriers, mingles and confounds everything there, they give him thanks, heap him with their perfumes, and load him with their