About a fortnight ago I happened to meet him bringing down ten of his hives. He was walking in front and was immediately followed by two women each with crates on their backs, and each carrying five hives. They seemed to me to be ordinary deal boxes, open at the top, but covered over with gauze which would keep the bees in but not exclude air. I asked him if the bees minded the journey, and he replied that they were very angry and had a great deal to say about it; he was sure to be stung when he let them out. He said it was “un lavoro improbo,” and cost him a great deal of anxiety. “The Lost Chord” It should be “The Lost Progression,” for the young lady was mistaken in supposing she had ever heard any single chord “like the sound of a great Amen.” Unless we are to suppose that she had already found the chord of C Major for the final syllable of the word and was seeking the chord for the first syllable; and there she is on the walls of a Milanese restaurant arpeggioing experimental harmonies in a transport of delight to advertise Somebody and Someone’s pianos and holding the loud pedal solidly down all the time. Her family had always been unsympathetic about her music. They said it was like a loose bundle of fire-wood which you never can get across the room without dropping sticks; they said she would have been so much better employed doing anything else. Fancy being in the room with her while she was strumming about and hunting after her chord! Fancy being in heaven with her when she had found it! Introduction of Foreign Plants I have brought back this year some mountain auriculas and the seed of some salvia and Fusio tiger-lily, and mean to plant the auriculas and to sow the seeds in Epping Forest and elsewhere round about London. I wish people would more generally bring back the seeds of pleasing foreign plants and introduce them broadcast, sowing them by our waysides and in our fields, or in whatever situation is most likely to suit them. It is true, this would puzzle botanists, but there is no reason why botanists should not be puzzled. A botanist is a person whose aim is to uproot, kill and exterminate every plant that is at all remarkable for rarity or any special virtue, and the rarer it is the more bitterly he will hunt it down. Saint Cosimo and Saint Damiano at Siena