There are two things in this England of ours which profoundly astonish all who love bees, and have a true conception of their possibilities. Travel where you may in the land, the last thing you are likely to meet with is a bee-farm, or even a few hives in a cottage-garden; while every yard of your way has its nook of blossom, and every mile its stretch of flowery pasture, where, in sober truth, tons of honey are annually running to waste. All this could be garnered and sold to the people at little trouble and great profit, if only enterprise would wake up from its island-lethargy and stretch forth the hand. But the years dribble uselessly by, and nothing is done. Here and there a wide-awake husbandman gets a little township of hives together, sells in the neighbourhood all the honey his bees make, and puts to his pocket a gold and silver lining. But this is only a drop in the ocean, and the British people must send abroad for their honey, which they do to the pretty tune of more than £30,000 a year. Hitherto, reasoning backward from effect to cause, it would seem that farming has been remunerative only when undertaken on a large scale; but those who can read the signs of the times tell us that the age, just dawning to the country-side, will be the age of the small man. And this must mean that the hereditary aristocracy among crops—wheat, oats, barley—will slowly give place to little-culture: in a word, that the land will be made to produce, not the things that tradition and our yeoman family pride have ordained as the be-all and end-all of farming, but the minor, humble necessities for which each town and village should look to the good brown earth immediately about it, but at present looks in vain. Farmers’ ladies may then no longer sit in their drawing-rooms and ride in their carriages, but that will be a change for the simpler, more proportionate. Those who live in towns have little conception of it; but the country-dweller knows well what complexity and luxury have got into the old English farmhouses, for all the outcry about hard times; how the farmer’s wife no longer goes to her dairy, nor makes any of the good old farmhouse things that served to uphold country England in days gone by; and how the master-agriculturists now are the sinews of the great London Stores, while the little local shopkeepers are left to the field-labourer with his twelve or fifteen shillings a week.