gave its first yawn and stretch of waking. Without preface, he
suddenly asked me, "Would you be a parson?"

I was mentally so far away that I couldn't get back in time to
comprehend or answer before he had repeated: "What would yu' take to be
a parson?"

He drawled it out in his gentle way, precisely as if no nine days stood
between it and our last real intercourse.

"Take?" I was still vaguely moving in my distance. "How?"

His next question brought me home.

"I expect the Pope's is the biggest of them parson jobs?"

It was with an "Oh!" that I now entirely took his idea. "Well, yes;
decidedly the biggest."

"Beats the English one? Archbishop--ain't it?--of Canterbury? The Pope
comes ahead of him?"

"His Holiness would say so if his Grace did not."

The Virginian turned half in his saddle to see my face--I was, at the
moment, riding not quite abreast of him--and I saw the gleam of his
teeth beneath his mustache. It was seldom I could make him smile, even
to this slight extent. But his eyes grew, with his next words, remote
again in their speculation.

"His Holiness and his Grace. Now if I was to hear 'em namin' me
that-a-way every mawnin', I'd sca'cely get down to business."

"Oh, you'd get used to the pride of it."

"'Tisn't the pride. The laugh is what would ruin me. 'Twould take 'most
all my attention keeping a straight face. The Archbishop"--here he
took one of his wide mental turns--"is apt to be a big man in them
Shakespeare plays. Kings take talk from him they'd not stand from
anybody else; and he talks fine, frequently. About the bees, for
instance, when Henry is going to fight France. He tells him a beehive
is similar to a kingdom. I learned that piece." The Virginian could not
have expected to blush at uttering these last words. He knew that his
sudden color must tell me in whose book it was he had learned the piece.
Was not her copy of Kenilworth even now In his cherishing pocket? So
he now, to cover his blush, very deliberately recited to me the
Archbishop's discourse upon bees and their kingdom:

"'Where some, like magistrates, correct at home...
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make loot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor:
He, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

"Ain't that a fine description of bees a-workin'? 'The s