Thus we wandered and talked; and I—feigning ignorance of bee-matters, lest he might think I was but carrying coals to Newcastle in clumsy charity—bought honey, and asked many questions; and slowly the entire meaning of what had been done by these emancipated slaves of City clerkdom was revealed. The bee-master pushed his old straw hat back over his clever forehead, and lit the most comfortable pipe I had ever set eyes on. He had evidently thought the whole thing out long ago, and got it down to its essential elements. [Picture: A forest apiary] “What we are doing here,” he said, “could be done by hundreds of others who are still in London in what was once our old plight. Large bee-farms are all very well, but they are more or less a thing of the future—something that is still to be evolved out of twentieth-century needs. But the bee-garden has its immediate use and place in every district where there is an average population. People generally have got out of the habit of eating honey because it is so seldom on sale in the shops; but if you steadily and continuously remind them of it, they will buy, and soon grow to wonder how they did without it for so long. But it must be set before them in an attractive way. Run-honey must be bright and pure to look at, and neatly bottled and labelled. If you sell honey in the comb, the section-boxes must be spotlessly clean and white. In that old book that first led me to bee-keeping, it says that only the English bee should be kept, because it is a better honey-gatherer. But, from the salesman’s point of view, there is a much more weighty reason for abjuring all foreign strains of bees. English bees leave a thin film of air between the honey and the cell cappings, and the result is that the comb always looks perfectly white. But nearly all foreigners fill their cells to the brim, and this means that the finest honeycomb will have a dark and dirty appearance, and no one will be tempted to buy. That is the sort of thing a business-man thinks of first, so the old training days in London have not been altogether without their use even here.” The song, aloof and desultory, that I had heard from the garden-gate, was growing clearer as we walked; and now we turned the house-corner, and came upon more hives, with a neat, girlish figure busy among them; and, hard by, a tiny laundry-shed, wherein I caught a glimpse of brown arms deep in a wash-tub, and heard the last stanza of the vagulous song. “Hetty, there,” explained the bee-master, “helps in the garden, and— Helps, did I say? Why, she is far and away a better hand at it than I. There is so much in hive-work that needs the light touch which only a woman can give. And Deborah, she keeps house for us. Did you know that the word Deborah was Hebrew for a honey-bee? But come and see where I make the hives on winter days, and where we sling the honey, and fill the super-crates with the sections, and all the rest of it.”