to a Cottage.
But they are most capricious milkers. Of course you make your own
butter; that is to say, with the addition of a dozen purchased pounds
weekly, you are not very often out of that commodity. Then, once or
twice in a summer, they suddenly lose their temper, and chase the
governess and your daughters over the edge of a gravel-pit. Nothing they
like so much as the tender sprouts of cauliflower, nor do they abhor
green pease. The garden-hedge is of privet--a pretty fence, and fast
growing, but not formidable to a four-year-old. On going to eat a few
gooseberries by sunrise, you start a covey of cows, that in their alarm
plunge into the hot-bed with a smash, as if all the glass in the island
had been broken--and rushing out at the gate at the critical instant
little Tommy is tottering in, they leave the heir-apparent, scarcely
deserving that name, half hidden in the border. There is no sale for
such outlandish animals in the home-market, and it is not Martinmas, so
you must make a present of them to the president or five silver-cupman
of an agricultural society, and you receive in return a sorry red round,
desperately saltpetred, at Christmas.

What is a Cottage in the country, unless "your banks are all furnished
with bees, whose murmurs invite one to sleep?" There the hives stand,
like four-and-twenty fiddlers all in a row. Not a more harmless insect
in all this world than a bee. Wasps are devils incarnate, but bees are
fleshly sprites, as amiable as industrious. You are strolling along in
delightful mental vacuity, looking at a poem of Barry Cornwall's, when
smack comes an infuriated honey-maker against your eyelid, and plunges
into you the fortieth part of an inch of sting saturated in venom. The
wretch clings to your lid like a burr, and it feels as if he had a
million claws to hold him on while he is darting his weapon into your
eyeball. Your banks are indeed well furnished with bees, but their
murmurs do not invite you to sleep; on the contrary, away you fly like a
madman, bolt into your wife's room, and roar out for the recipe. The
whole of one side of your face is most absurdly swollen, while the other
is _in statu quo_. One eye is dwindled away to almost nothing, and is
peering forth from its rainbow-coloured envelope, while the other is
open as day to melting charity, and shining over a cheek of the purest
crimson. Infatuated man! Why could you not purchase your honey? Jemmy
Thomson, the poet, would