nd deepening, arose one sustained and musical
susurration of innumerable wings.

"You will be wise to stay here," said Hicks. He himself stopped a
moment, opened his bag, put on his veil and gloves, and tucked his
trousers inside his stockings.

"Not I. I wish to see the hiving."

Twenty yards distant a play of light and glint and twinkle of many
frantic bees converged upon one spot, as stars numerically increase
towards the heart of a cluster. The sky was full of flying insects, and
their wings sparkled brightly in the sun; though aloft, with only the
blue for background, they appeared as mere dark points filling the air
in every direction. The swarm hung at the very heart of a little glade.
Here two ancient apple-trees stood apart, and from one low bough,
stretched at right angles to the parent stem, and not devoid of leaves
and blossoms, there depended a grey-brown mass from which a twinkling,
flashing fire leaped forth as from gems bedded in the matrix. Each
transparent wing added to the dazzle under direct sunlight; the whole
agglomeration of life was in form like a bunch of grapes, and where it
thinned away to a point the bees dropped off by their own weight into
the grass below, then rose again and either flew aloft in wide and
circling flight or rushed headlong upon the swarm once more. Across the
iridescent cluster passed a gleam and glow of peacock and iris, opal and
mother-of-pearl; while from its heart ascended a deep murmur, telling of
tremendous and accumulated energy suddenly launched into this peaceful
glade of apple-blossom and ambient green. The frenzy of the moment held
all that little laborious people. There was none of the concerted action
to be observed at warping, or simultaneous motion of birds in air and
fishes in water; but each unit of the shining army dashed on its own
erratic orbit, flying and circling, rushing hither and thither, and
sooner or later returning to join the queen upon the bough.

The glory of the moment dominated one and all. It was their hour--a
brief, mad ecstasy in short lives of ceaseless toil. To-day they
desisted from their labours, and the wild-flowers of the waste places,
and the old-world flowers in cottage gardens were alike forgotten. Yet
their year had already seen much work and would see more. Sweet pollen
from many a bluebell and anemone was stored and sealed for a generation
unborn; the asphodels and violets, the velvet wallflower and yellow
crocuses had alr