lete exhaustion, and lamented that mind, though
infinitely superior to, was not yet independent of matter.

The bees hummed much to the same tune. The Queen Bee recommended our
foreigner to read a work on 'Bees and Wasps,' with a few minor details
relating to Ants, by Sir John Lubbock, in the International Scientific
Series. She was not, indeed quite so timid about her reputation as
the ant, and even volunteered to give her visitor an account of the
formation of hexagonal cells by Natural Selection, culled from the pages
of the 'Origin of Species'; but she observed that, though her brain
might be smaller in proportion than the brains of some inferior insects,
it was of finer quality, what there was of it, and that fairies were
merely an outgrowth of the anthropomorphic tendency which had been
noticed by distinguished writers as persisting even in the present day.
Then she departed, humming gaily, to the tune of a popular hymn in the
'Ancient and Modern' collection:

'And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower?

But the whole sad history of Queen Mab's failures to enlist sympathy and
protection it would be vain to tell. The fishes, all that were left of
them, took her part; but they lived in the water, and she had never had
very much to do with them. In the birds she found her true allies. They
were not attached to the higher civilisation. The higher civilisation,
so far, had treated them inconsiderately, at sparrow clubs. The Owl
talked a good deal about the low moral tone of the human race in this
respect, and was pessimistic about it, failing to perceive that higher
types of organisms always like to signify their superiority over lower
ones by shooting them, or otherwise making their lives a burden. The
Owl, however, was a very talented bird, and one felt that even his
fallacies were a mark of attainments beyond those common to his race. He
had read and thought a great deal, and could tell Queen Mab about almost
anything she asked him. This was pleasant, and she sat with him on a
very high oak in Epping Forest, above a pond, and made observations.
It was lovely weather, just the weather for sitting on the uppermost
branches of a great oak, and she began to feel like herself again. She
had forgotten to put her invisible cloak on; but as she was only half a
foot high, and dressed in green, no one saw her up there. Having reached
the Forest at night, she had met as yet with few British subjects; b