But of all intolerable fates, that must be least bearable, to have wisely willed and beautifully fashioned our own eternity; and then, being only human, or at least reasonable, to find its goodness really smooth-going, colour-fast, impregnable at all points, with never a bright break or flaw to vary the monotony of well-doing. No wonder the honey-bee swarms, breaks helter-skelter out of her prison-bounds of order, commendable toil, chill, maidenly propriety; and goes rioting away for one short hour of joyousness and madcap frolic, such as her primæval sisters looked to as the common day’s lot, when there were no hives, and motherhood was not the sole prerogative of one in thirty thousand, and when the sun burned high and cheerily in heaven from end to end of the tropic year. It is easy to be wise, and temperately scientific, in accounting for this feverish impulse of the worker-bees, allotting it a sound and circumspect part in the furtherance of the general polity. But is it not, in the main, Nature—the atrophied sexual spirit—awakening, or at least stirring a little in her age-long sleep? In the sultry August evenings the young queens of the ant-hills pour out in unnumbered thousands to meet the males, and people the ruddy sunshine with the glint of their wings. This is swarming in its truest sense. The wingless, workful, underground existence follows, but the love-flight of the ants, while it lasts, is none the less a real, intensely joyous thing. And surely the swarming-fever that so strangely and inopportunely seizes upon hive-life, is at one with it in nature and spirit, although its original purpose and value have been long ago lost in the ages. [Picture: A mammoth swarm]