He showed me then his workshop and a little gauze-windowed shed where there was a homemade honey-extractor—a cunning, centrifugal thing by which the combs could be emptied and restored unbroken to the bees, to be charged again and again. And there was a storehouse, where long rows of honey-jars, and stacks of sections, and blocks of pale yellow wax were waiting for the purchaser, and a packing-shed where the postboxes of corrugated cardboard were made up. Finally there was pointed out to me, in a far-off corner of the garden, a donkey—shaggy, well-fed, placidly browsing—and, under a neighbouring pent-roof, a little cart that was a curiosity in its way. Its wooden tilt was made to represent a big beehive, and on it was painted the name of the bee-garden and a list of hive-products which it carried for sale. The bee-master put an admiring hand upon it. “It was all Hetty’s idea,” he said. “London girls for pluck, you know! And she goes into the town with it once a fortnight in the season; takes it away crammed full, mind, and never brings back an ounce! Somehow or other, I think those girls ought to change names!” * * * * * Journeying back to the railroad-station under the eternal English sunshine and through the chain of blossoming fields, I listened to the chant of the bees around me; and though it was the familiar sound of a lifetime, there was something in it then which I had never heard before. The rich note rose and fell; died down to silence as the path led through impregnable red-clover; swelled again as the land paled to the rosy hue of the sainfoin; burst out into a loud, glad symphony where a patch of charlock blent its despised, uncoveted gold with the farmer’s drill. “You thought you knew our ways of life from Alpha to Omega”—so seemed to run, in fancy, the wavering refrain. “You have pried upon us day and night, in season and out of season. You have chloroformed us, vivisected us, torn our dead sisters limb from limb to feed the cruel, glittering eyes of that binocular of yours. You have come at last to think that there was nothing about us, within or without or round about, that you had not got to know. And here a common City clerk, turned tail on his hereditary duty, has shown you, in one short hour, a whole sheaf of things about us which you—Peeping Tom that you are!—in a whole life’s keyhole-prying have never guessed. Out upon you! You deserve to have to do with nothing better than bumble-bees for the rest of your days!”