I have forgotten the name of the man who lived just out of town and kept bees. I cannot even remember whether he occupied the old manse at Lustrup or the Dam-house. It was one of them, I know. The thing I do remember is the shift he made to tend his bees without getting up with the sun as did they. The honey they gather on the heath when the broom is purple has a wild flavor which nothing can match, but it is essential that they shall be about it early, while the morning sun is on the heather. For some reason they closed the hives at night, and some one had to open them at sunrise. The keeper was fond of lying late in bed, and it was laziness in this instance that was the mother of invention. He kept hens also, and their coop adjoined the hives. They were early risers too; he heard them jump down from their roosts when he ought to be out tending his bees. So he hit upon a contrivance, a sort of lever under the roost, which, when the hens jumped upon it, opened the hives and let the bees out. After that he could lie in bed and laugh while his husbandry went on. He was the only inventor I ever knew the Old Town to turn out, unless you count in the telegrapher who came when the wires had been strung to our coast. He was a lonesome, morose man, fond of taking long walks by himself. On one of his tramps a vagrant dog attached itself to him, and the two became friends. The telegrapher had the notion, however, that a well-behaved dog must trot obediently at its master’s heels, and that he could not make his dog do. So he kept him half-starved, and when he went out, tied a piece of meat to the end of his stick. After that they were always seen together in the orthodox way, the dog sniffing industriously in his tracks as he strode along, looking neither to the right nor to the left. He was a very thin and ungainly man, who could look over a six-foot fence without standing on his toes, and the procession through the town was most singular. Of course we dubbed him “the Bone.” The old bookseller was there, whose birthday was a movable feast. The date had been lost, and as it was somewhere in the spring and he liked Whitsuntide, anyhow, he kept it on that Sunday, whenever it came. It was something to have even the sun get up and dance on your birthday. Perhaps that persuaded him. It was the tradition that you could see the sun skip for joy on the holy morning very early, in that latitude. Most people took the dance on trust and stayed in bed. And we had the funny German shoemaker whose bills were the gems of the town. The one he sent to the factory owner’s wife, who was a very fine and aristocratic lady, became its great classic. It ran thus: “En Paar Stiefel “Die Madame--Verschnudelt und hintergeflickt.”[4]