, is, indeed, one of their ruling
traits. When a bee marks the place of his hive, or of a bit of good
pasturage in the fields or swamps, or of the bee-hunter's box of
honey on the hills or in the woods, he returns to it as unerringly as
fate.

Honey was a much more important article of food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in the
open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Besides grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions,
and dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.

Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and
honey within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat and
milk and cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept
farmhouse will be supplied.

Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity,
an article doubtless in no wise superior to our best products. Leigh
Hunt's "Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and
literature, Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always
been rich in bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says
the woods on this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people
also had many hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are
native to the island in this respect, and abou