But it is still to be obtained; and those of us who have had the good fortune to taste good old mead, well matured in the wood, are sure to feel a regret that no determined effort is being made to rehabilitate it in the national favour. Perhaps there is no more wholesome drink in the world, and certainly none requiring less technical skill in the making. All the ancient books on bee-keeping give receipts for its manufacture, differing only in the variety of foreign ingredients added for its improvement, or, as we prefer to believe, to its degradation. For the finest mead can be brewed from pure honey and water alone, and any addition of spices or other matter serves only to destroy its unique flavour. Some of the sixteenth and seventeenth century bee-masters were renowned in their day for their mead-brewing; and one of the foremost of them claims for his potion that it was absolutely indistinguishable, by the most competent judges, from old Canary Sack. He gives careful directions for the manufacture of his mead; and these can be, and have, indeed, recently been, followed with complete success. This mead, when kept for a number of years, froths into the glass like champagne, but stills at once, leaving the glass lined with sparkling air-bells. It is of a pale golden colour, and has a bouquet something like old cider; but its flavour is hardly to be compared with any known liquor of the present time. It is interesting, however, to have its originator’s authority for its close resemblance to Canary Sack, as this gives a clue to the intrinsic qualities of a wine long since passed out of the popular ken. CHAPTER III BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES STUDENTS of old books on the honey-bee are generally struck with two very remarkable characteristics about them—their invariable fine old classic and romantic flavour, and their ingenious leavening of a great mass of quite obvious fable by a very small modicum of enduring fact. It is difficult to realise, until one has delved deep into these curious old records, how completely they are dyed through and through with the picturesque, but mainly erroneous, ideas of the ancient classic bee-fathers. The writers were, almost without exception, earnest, practical men, whose chief interest in life was the study and pursuit of their craft. But they seem, one and all, to have laboured under the idea that it was their bounden duty to uphold everything written about bees by the old Greek and Roman _litterati_, and that it would be the rankest heresy to advance any new truth, garnered from their individual experience, unless it could be supported by ample testimony from the same infallible source. [Picture: Moses Rusden’s Bee-book]