C. BRYANT.

"Some silent laws our hearts will make,
Which they shall long obey;
We for the year to come may take
Our temper from to-day."--WORDSWORTH.

"You know what an Apiary is, Isaac, of course?"

I was sitting in the bee-master's cottage, opposite to him, in an
arm-chair, which was the counterpart of his own, both of them having
circular backs, diamond-shaped seats, and chintz cushions with frills.
It was the summer following that in which Jem and I had tried to see how
badly we could behave; this uncivilized phase had abated: Jem used to
ride about a great deal with my father, and I had become intimate with
Isaac Irvine.

"You know what an Apiary is, Isaac?" said I.

"A what, sir?"

"An A-P-I-A-R-Y."

"To be sure, sir, to be sure," said Isaac. "An _appyary_" (so he was
pleased to pronounce it), "I should be familiar with the name, sir, from
my bee-book, but I never calls my own stock anything but the beehives.
_Beehives_ is a good, straightforward sort of a name, sir, and it serves
my turn."

"Ah, but you see we haven't come to the B's yet," said I, alluding to
what I was thinking of.

"Does your father think of keeping 'em, sir?" said Isaac, alluding to
what he was thinking of.

"Oh, he means to have them bound, I believe," was my reply.

The bee-master now betrayed his bewilderment, and we had a hearty laugh
when we discovered that he had been talking about bees whilst I had been
talking about the weekly numbers of the _Penny Cyclopaedia_, which had
not as yet reached the letter B, but in which I had found an article on
Master Isaac's craft, under the word Apiary, which had greatly
interested me, and ought, I thought, to be interesting to the
bee-keeper. Still thinking of this I said,

"Do you ever take your bees away from home, Isaac?"

"They're on the moors now, sir," said Isaac.

"_Are_ they?" I exclaimed. "Then you're like the Egyptians, and like the
French, and the Piedmontese; only you didn't take them in a barge."

"Why, no, sir. The canal don't go nigh-hand of the moors at all."

"The Egyptians," said I, leaning back into the capacious arms of my
chair, and epitomizing what I had read, "who live in Lower Egypt put all
their beehives into boats and take them on the river to Upper Egypt.
Right up at that end of the Nile the flowers come out earliest, and the
bees get all the good out of them there, and then the boats are moved
lower down to where the same kind