Many lovers of country life, peripatetic artists and chance pedestrians for the most part, came to the village with this notion firmly impressed upon them, and, visiting the old bee-garden and finding the old beautiful things there in abundance, went no farther, and became no wiser. They wandered round the crooked, red-tiled paths of the garden with its ancient proprietor; stooped under bowers of living gold and purple; waded through seas of scarlet poppy and blue forget-me-not and tawny mignonette; came upon old beehives in all sorts of shady, unpremeditated corners; and steeped themselves in mediævalism up to the eyes. The very song of the bees seemed to belong entirely to past days. None, surely, but a hopeless Vandal could put a colony of bees in one of the ugly square hives, and expect them to go honey-seeking in the old harmonious, happy way, sanctified of the ages. And so they never ventured up the hill to the great bee-farm, but kept to the garden below, and listened by the hour together to the quaint talk of its white-headed, smock-frocked owner, or stood valiantly at the foot of the ladder when he climbed up to dislodge a swarm from the moss-grown apple-boughs, or helped him to scour the new straw skeps with handfuls of mint and lavender, or beat out weird, unskilful music with the door-key on the old brass-pan when a swarm was high in the air. Much could be learnt, it is true, from quiet days spent in the old bee-garden, especially in May, before the earliest swarms were ready to forsake the hives.