, the walls of golden
honey-comb, and the air sweet with the breath of flowers. It was a busy
place; some got the food and stored it up in the little cells; some were
the house-maids, and kept all exquisitely neat; some took care of the
eggs and fed the young bees like good nurses; and others waited on the
Queen.

"Will you stay and work with us? No one is idle here, and it is a
happier life than playing all day," said Buzz, the friendly bee.

"I hate to work," answered lazy Thistle, and would not do anything at
all.

Then they told him he must go; that made him angry, and he went to some
of the bees whom he had made discontented by his fine tales of an idle
life, and said to them,--

"Let us feast and be jolly; winter is far off and there is no need to
work in the summer time. Come and make merry, while those busy fellows
are away, and the nurses watching the babies in the cells."

Then he led the drones to the hive, like a band of robbers; first they
fastened the Queen into her royal room, so she could do nothing but buzz
angrily; next they drove the poor house-keepers away, and frightened the
little bees into fits as they went rioting through the waxen halls,
pulling down the honey-comb, and stealing the bee-bread carefully put
away in the neat cells for winter time. They stayed as long as they
dared, and flew off before the workers came home to find their pretty
hive in ruins.

"That was fine fun," said Thistle, as he went to hide in a great forest
where he thought the angry bees could not find him.

Here he soon made friends with a gay dragon-fly, and they had splendid
games skimming over the lake or swinging on the ferns that grew about
it. For a while Thistle was good, and might have had a happy time if he
had not quarrelled with his friend about a little fish that the cruel
elf pricked with his sword till it nearly died. Gauzy-wing thought that
very cruel, and said he would tell the Brownies who ruled over
everything in the wood.

"I'm not afraid," answered Thistle; "they can't hurt me."

But he _was_ afraid, and as soon as the dragon-fly was asleep that
night, he got an ugly spider to come and spin webs all round the poor
thing till it could stir neither leg nor wing.

Then leaving it to starve, Thistle flew out of the wood, sure that the
Brownies would not catch him.

But they did, for they knew all that happened in their kingdom; and when
he stopped to rest in a wild morning-glory-bell, they sen