IT is a quality of English sunshine that it comes and goes capriciously, so that no man may be sure of the comradeship of his shadow from day to day. But when there is sunshine in England, it always seems an abiding, permanent force. The grey of yesterday, and the patter-song of the rain on the leaves, were only a dream. You were sleeping under the changeless blue of a summer night, and had but a vision of weeping, drab skies, gone now with the joy that comes in the morning. And to-morrow, when perhaps the old wild scurry of storm-cloud is alive overhead, and all the house resounds with the runnel-music from the pouring eaves, still it will be only a dream. Of a surety you will tell yourself so, as the sun breaks through the griddle of cloud, and the wind relents, and the Dutchman can get to his tailoring; and when you are stepping out amidst the swamp and glitter and rehabilitation of life, as glad of it all as the finches and butterflies that sweep on before you down the lane. The sun shines: you know it has always shone, changeless as Time itself. With such a faith—unfounded and therefore uncontestable—I came under the glow of one brave June morning, threading field after field of blossoming clover until I stood at the gate of the bee-garden over against the hill. With its name I had long been familiar, for in the county paper there was always the little five-line advertisement, quaintly worded, announcing honey for sale. But I had never yet seen it, nor, indeed, ever set foot in this part of the good Sussex land. So, on this brimming June morning, giving rein for once to the indolent Shank’s mare of moods that is fated to carry me, I set out into the bright sloth, the joyous hastelessness, of the day; and came at length to my destination—to the bee-garden that nestles under the green Downland hills. It was girt about with a tall hedge of hawthorn, smothered in snowlike blossom, with just that rosy tinge upon it which is the first hectic of decay. Beyond the hedge I could see, stretching aloft, green apple-boughs, whose full-blown posies were alive with the desperate humming energy of countless bees. There was a blue wisp of smoke trailing idly away from a chimney-stack, all that could be seen of the snug thatched cottage within; and there were voices, a leisurely baritone, a sudden peal of laughter high-pitched and obviously a woman’s, and now and then a bar or two of an old song sung in an intermittent, absent-minded way.