And then, if he be wise, the student will learn at last to give the picturesque old bee-garden its true appraisement. Ancient things conserve their beauty, and win the love of the right kind of lovers, more and more with every century that glides by. Only their usefulness, their import in the tide of human knowledge and progress, has gone with the years. It is so with the bee-garden under its Maytide robe of green leaves and rainbow blossoms. It is beautiful in its glad appearances, its echo of old voices, its odour of the sanctity in ancient ways and days. But it can tell us nothing of all we want to know. It can only ask us riddles to which we have no answers. For these we must set aside old fanciful scruples; turn our backs, once for all, on its enchantment and its sweetness; bend our steps unswervingly towards the great modern bee-farm on the hill. CHAPTER V THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE HIVE A DOCTOR DRYASDUST will manage to impart to the truths he meddles with a disastrous air of dulness and stagnation; but to walk in a fools’ paradise of beautiful, artistic error is to lay oneself open to an infinitely worse fate. There never was a truth in Nature that was dull or uninteresting, except in its human presentment. There never was a pretty worthless fiction that did not show its dross and tinsel when brought out into the searching light of day. Romance, the spirit of poetry, have largely changed their venue of recent years. The unconscionable delver among old things, old thoughts, old conventions, on the strand of Time, has tarried so long in his one little florid corner that he is in some danger of being caught by the tide. He must soon either mend his pace or swim for it. Human regard is turning more and more towards those who deal in living verities—the men who search the stars, who win new powers out of the common air, who find at last the authentic teachings in the old worn texts of the stones and brooks. These are the true poets, romancists, tellers of wondrous tales; and these will hold the crowd—which is never far astray in its intuitions—when all the singers of sick fancies and the harpers on frayed golden strings have gone off in melancholy dudgeon to their own place.