(the 10th of May by my diary);
and at the end of it are two small arbours, set back to back, their
dilapidated sides and roofs bound together by clematis.

The night of my arrival, my landlady asked me to make the least
possible noise in unpacking my portmanteau, because there was trouble
next door, and the partitions were thin. Our neighbour's wife was
down with inflammation, she explained--inflammation of the lungs, as
I learnt by a question or two. It was a bad case. She was a wisht,
ailing soul to begin with. Also the owls in the wood above had been
hooting loudly, for nights past: and yesterday a hedge-sparrow lit on
the sill of the sick-room window, two sure tokens of approaching
death. The sick woman was being nursed by her elder sister, who had
lived in the house for two years, and practically taken charge of it.
"Better the man had married _she_" my landlady added, somewhat
unfeelingly.

I saw the man in his garden early next morning: a tall
fellow, hardly yet on the wrong side of thirty, dressed in
loose-fitting tweed coat and corduroys. A row of bee-hives stood
along his side of the party wall, and he had taken the farthest one,
which was empty, off its stand, and was rubbing it on the inside with
a handful of elder-flower buds, by way of preparation for a new
swarm. Even from my bed-room window I remarked, as he turned his
head occasionally, that he was singularly handsome. His movements
were those of a lazy man in a hurry, though there seemed no reason
for hurry in his task. But when it was done, and the hive replaced,
his behaviour began to be so eccentric that I paused in the midst of
my shaving, to watch.

He passed slowly down the line of bee-hives, halting beside each in
turn, and bending his head down close to the orifice with the exact
action of a man whispering a secret into another's ear. I believe he
kept this attitude for a couple of minutes beside each hive--there
were eight, besides the empty one. At the end of the row he lifted
his head, straightened his shoulders, and cast a glance up at my
window, where I kept well out of sight. A minute after, he entered
his house by the back door, and did not reappear.

At breakfast I asked my landlady if our neighbour were wrong in his
head at all. She looked astonished, and answered, "No: he was a
do-nothing fellow--unless you counted it hard work to drive a
carrier's van thrice a week into Tregarrick, and home the same night.
But he k