To youth the world seemed bitterly cruel and uncaring, for every form of life--except those idealists, the bees--survived by the death of another form. The declining days with their ebb of warmth killed the million million insects and butterflies whose hum had been so dim and happy in the summer. By a dry mossy bank underneath a hedge of bullace in whose unleafed raggedness the sere and twisted chords of the traveller’s joy had grown, the willow herb flowers were still in bloom when October had yielded most of its blackberries. Below the pink flowers and on the same stem the long pods were splitting and their seeds, swung under down, drifting with the wind. As I watched, a humble bee, numbed with cold sought the sanctuary of a pink flower, clung for a moment swaying, then fell to the moss below and lay still on its side. The hooked legs moved feebly, the wings shivered; no warmth came from the weak sunshine, and so it died. By night a mouse would consume its body--beautiful with the bar of tawny velvet on its duskiness. From the time of early spring, when first the willow wren had called by the stream, the bee had climbed over the flowers, bartering the gold grains of the pollen for the honey that it desired so eagerly. In April it had gone to the apple blossom in the orchard and heavy-odoured nettles filling the ditches; invaded the sanctities of all the flowers of summer’s lavishing. Busy was my hunchback bee, feeding on no other form of life, helping the birth of the seeds to which the hue and scent of the petals were servant, working for the future of her race, utterly selfless; humming a wander-song as the sun strengthened its vanes, now fretted by toil and labour. Then there was no hope anywhere, no voice among the trees, nothing but the feeble winnowing of the leaves as they sank to the earth, and the dazed drone of a dying fly.