"promise," how
many have died in despair, or worse still, are living so besotted by
vice, so lost to all power of virtuous resolutions, that they shall
never more see the happy homes from which they so thoughtlessly
wandered, never more hear the soft accents of loving friends; never more
worship God, in a peaceful Sanctuary, or ever again behold an opened
Bible!

"Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold,
Molten, graven, hammer'd, and roll'd;
Heavy to get, and light to hold;
Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold,
Stolen, borrow'd, squander'd, doled:
Spurn'd by the young, but hugg'd by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould;
Price of many a crime untold;
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold!
How widely its agencies vary--
To save--to ruin--to curse--to bless--
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamp'd with the image of Good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary!"
_Hood._

CHAPTER XVI.

HONEY. PASTURAGE. OVERSTOCKING.

In the chapter on Feeding, it has already been stated that honey is not
a natural secretion of the bee, but a substance obtained from the
nectaries of the blossoms; it is not therefore, made, but merely
gathered by the bees. The truth is well expressed in the lines so
familiar to most of us from our childhood,

"How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And _gather_ honey all the day
From every opening flower."

Bees not only gather honey from the blossoms, but often obtain it in
large quantities from what have been called honey dews; "a term applied
to those sweet, clammy drops that glitter on the foliage of many trees
in hot weather." Two different opinions have been zealously advocated as
to the origin of honey-dews. By some, they are considered a natural
exudation from the leaves of trees, a perspiration as it were,
occasioned often by ill health, though sometimes a provision to enable
the plants to resist the fervent heats to which they are exposed. Others
insist that this sweet substance is discharged from the bodies of those
aphides or small lice which infest the leaves of so many plants.
Unquestionably they are produced in both ways.

Messrs. Kirby and Spence, in their interesting work on Entomology, have
given a description of the kind of honey-dew furnished by the aphides.

"The loves of the an