The Bee Sermons

I.

WHEN the Rev. Amos Hutchison assumed charge of the spiritual welfare of the Bethesda Methodist Church of “ Honeyville, ” to give the place its familiar nickname, he was not long in discovering what it meant to have for a pastorate the centre of the most famous honey producing township of the Middle States. That first May morning, as the old man walked the few hundred yards which separated the parsonage from the church, the whole upper air seemed to be a-drone with the hum of bees, In every dooryard and kitchen garden he could make out little gray rows and clusters of hives ; and Deacon Snow assured him that the farmers of his congregation had fifty colonies to the townspeople’s five.

The first pastoral visits made by the Rev. Amos revealed, in a dozen different parlor albums, little treasuries of red, blue, and yellow prize tickets for honey and wax shown at county and state fairs. Indeed, the tables of the “reception ” sociable were themselves veritable exhibits of comb and “extracted.” Yet among the exhibitors there was no first suspicion of cankerous rivalry. For it is proverbial what good nature, optimism, large-heartedness, and philosophy distinguish all the tribe of beemen; or, if it is not proverbial, it surely ought to be. Certainly among the beekeepers of Honeyville there was such harmony in mutual good works as only the bees themselves could have taught. And every day the Rev. Amos realized more fully into what an atmosphere of honeyed amity kindly fortune had sent him.

Finally when H. C. Stevenson, owner of the six hundred colonies of “The Apiaries, ” following his custom with each new Honeyville pastor, formally presented him with two choice hives of “Italians,” old Mr. Hutchison felt that truly he had been initiated into the happiest and most generous freemasonry in the world. And his reverend forerunner, Langstroth, sainted in the beeman’s calendar, took to his famous swarms little more ardently than did the Rev. Amos.

For whole afternoons he would sit before them in marveling contemplation. He peered into them at night by the hour, often too without first subduing them with the smoker, — for the old man had not an ounce of fear in him. And his bookish training set him to looking up the amazing insects in his library. The “ B ” volume of his encyclopædia was never closed, and he borrowed a doxible armful of volumes from Stevenson.

At every meal he had some new wonder of the hive to unfold to his spinster daughter Deborah, who blinked sourly through her glasses and paid no attention to him, — or oftener to Hannah Ann, the girl. As for her she hearkened to him open-mouthed, as well she might; for not a few of the Rev. Amos’s wonders arose from his having in his zeal mightily misread his authorities; whereupon, he would go to her again next day, and while her pies burned or her irons grew cold he would satisfy his accusing conscience by minutely and circumstantially retracting it all.

Yet such small humiliations and setbacks could curb his enthusiasm but little. Indeed, it grew and grew, until by the end of the first week he was reading bee literature till midnight, and then getting up before sunrise to see the spies of his hives setting forth for the day’s blossom survey. And it culminated, like all his enthusiasms, in his feeling an absolute compulsion to make a sermon, nay a series of sermons, of it. The manuscript volume of dogeared discourses he had brought with him could very well stand over. He hated anything that smacked of the sensational, but here was a chance to speak to his flock from their immediate interests and experiences. And it would spring from him spontaneously. full of the breath of life. On the second Sunday morning of his ministrations he announced his intention; it was received with the most evident and general approval. He promised the first of the “ Bee Sermons ” by the first Sabbath in June. Monday afternoon he began work upon the magnum opus ; and the labor would have been an altogether happy one, — but for his neighbor, Cyrus F. Gallinger.

In Honeyville Gallinger possessed two characters. He was the cleverest country lawyer in the township, for which he was held in an admiration which if it was what one might call “ impersonal ” was none the less intense; and he was the village unbeliever, for which his admirers with much social prudence held very carefully aloof from him. He was a man of fifty. And old Mrs. Cruikshank, who for twenty years of that half century had been his housekeeper, was wont weakly to protest that he had a good, kind heart, and that it was only his head that had gone wrong. But Honeyville did not need to be told how obviously biased were such sentiments; and indeed Mrs. Cruikshank might well make the best she could of him, if only to cover her own very dubious conduct in working for him. As for the real truth about Gallinger, he was — both in himself and in what the attitude of the village had made him — a distinctly unlovable man. For he was crusty, contentious, razor-tongued, inordinately suspicious, and of a vengefulness almost satanic; when he found himself in a position to repay injury or insult, he reveled in it. In other things he was a Stoic; in “getting even,” a very Epicurean. And all ministers of the Gospel he hated as if he had been Lucifer himself.

Now fate and a thoughtless exchange of Honeyville real estate had so brought it that the parsonage study windows looked down upon Gallinger’s back garden and his ten hives of Italians (for, whatever he might not have faith in, he shared the village belief in bees), and thus, perforce spending much of his time under the very pastoral watch-tower as it were, he had been a soreness in the eyes of the spiritual guardians of the Bethesda congregation almost from the beginning. When old Mr. Hutchison’s predecessor had handed over his flock to him, he had given him bitterly to know that in Honeyville there was one individual ingredient which had the power to turn all the sweets of that mellifluous pastorate to vinegar and gall.

Yet during those first weeks in May there had been no collision between Gallinger and the new minister. When “ Cyrus F., ” as he was familiarly known, was not in his office farther down the street, — and he spent all his mornings there, — he was hidden in his little back-shed shop, busy at such anticipatory carpentering as all growing beeyards are, throughout the spring and summer, constantly demanding. And day after day, as the old clergyman sat ardently piling up and arranging his material for that bee series masterpiece, it seemed to him that Gallinger’s Italians, their hives in a row almost beneath his window and a-hum like so many little factories, were a sort of ever present inspiration. With the sweet incense of warm, honey-filled wax came up to him a cloud of new thoughts, fancies, images. His brain was aglow as he had not felt it for twenty years, and his heart swelled full of love for all mankind. Then on Monday afternoon of the second week Gallinger emerged from his carpenter-shop and began to do outside work on his colonies, — and in that hour trouble commenced.

Strangely enough, too, it was the Rev. Mr. Hutchison who was, however innocently and unwittingly, the first causer of it. For in the full tide and fervor of sermon - making it was his wont, unconsciously, to let his inward arguments and declamations gradually find outward and audible voice; first it would be in whisperings and mutterings, and then — while he would begin to pace with waving arms up and down his study — his tones would grow louder and louder, till they were of a true pulpit pitch and strength. And thus it was with his labors of that afternoon. The astounded Cyrus F. suddenly began to find himself verily haled to church and preached at in his own back garden! Consumed with rage, he stood it for a splenetic half-hour. Then he proceeded to get back with merciless unction.

But Gallinger had not become a successful lawyer by chance; he was a man whose anger, however fiercely within him it might be blazing, found expression only in a kind of diabolically caustic coolness. Since the Rev. Amos had chosen to sermonize him in that miserably skulking fashion that pretends to be impersonal he would reply in kind, and he would do it by a method which he had found was of exquisite power to torture the last occupant of the parsonage. Forthwith he began to let fall, solely for the edification of his bees he could have protested, a succession of rancorously heterodox observations, which if altogether general in nature were only too particular in application. The sermon-making came to a gasping full stop!

Then Gallinger, as he went with new “ supers ” from hive to hive, passed, too, by easy stages from his own impious reflections to citations and quotations from that famous, and more or less infamous, French school of unbelievers of the eighteenth century. He remembered that the effect they had had on Mr. Hutchison’s predecessor left nothing to be desired.

The Rev. Amos sat listening in semistupefaction. He was as wholly oblivious of having given any provocation for Gallinger’s remarks as he was wholly certain they were meant for him. The thing was incredible, — it was so absolutely uninvited, — malice going out of its way to be malignant! It made him sick for his race. But at last he pulled himself together, and with a final indignant shake of his heavy white mane, went down into his garden to re-sweeten his mind among his bees.

He willed to ignore and forget the incident. And Tuesday afternoon, when he had been at his desk for ten minutes, he had all but forgotten it. Once more his work enwrapped him. Once more the first half-hour found him striding his study’s length and bursting forth in fervid homily. And once more Gallinger was his ferocious audience of one! If the day before Cyrus F. had had for a possible moment any saving doubt that he was being preached at, he had none now. And with a venom more burning than the barbed stings of his Italians, he began to impart to them fragments of opinion which in another age would have sent him to the stake and fagot on the next public holiday.

Again the venerable Amos stopped short. For a moment the impulse to thrust forth his head and give free blaze to his wrath and scorn was almost ungovernable. But this was a foolish impulse and he conquered it. Patience and forbearance had kept him in optimism for sixty years. And if Gallinger was roweling him with all his impish malevolence, the Rev. Amos was, in his charity, a very pachyderm ; the lawyer’s goadings were mere pin-pricks, too small to cry out upon. Yet the old minister still had in him the fires of the controversialist. For every feeble, miserable slander, he had at his tongue’s end the crushing refutation, verse and chapter. He felt that in an hour’s debate he could so confound this blasphemous neighbor that it would be a twelve-month before he could raise his head. But again he was wise, and restraining himself, a second time went forth to renew his serenity at his hives.

Yet the following afternoon Gallinger, all the spite in him thoroughly aroused, began his hateful monologue as soon as he heard the old minister taking his place at his desk. And he continued it the next day and the next. Mr. Hutchison bit his lips together, and made a trial of working in his daughter’s room, and then in the front parlor. But he had constantly to go back and forth for books. And his desk and chair had become a part of his writing habit; he seemed not to be able to work away from them. And the latticed end of the veranda proved even worse, for he was not used to working in the open air.

From the beginning of his ministry he had made it his custom to give his mornings to his pastoral calls and general labors, and to change the order of a lifetime was not easy. Yet he resolved to do it. He held himself at his desk as best he could during those forenoon hours which kept the lawyer in his office ; and he was sometimes able to get in a half afternoon at his series in addition. But almost invariably if he grew absorbed enough to do work worth the doing, it would end in his arousing Gallinger afresh.

And now the old man could no longer listen to him in leonine contempt. It was almost a generation since he had known anger, but now he began to be taken by gusts and fits of rage. If Cyrus F., his own nerves growing every day more “rawed ” and ragged, now alluded to his neighbor only as “that shouting old fool next door,” the Rev. Amos found himself fiercely resolving that once he had finished his bee series, he would follow it with another which would compel either himself or Gallinger to leave the village. Indeed, to such a state of mind had he come that no longer was he even able to draw a soothing philosophy from his bees. He could not look at them, he could not think of them, without seeing Cyrus F. walking up and down before his colonies, filling them with shameless lies, tergiversations, blasphemies!

But as for the bees themselves, in the midst of war they were in peace. The Hutchison Italians and the Gallinger Italians together saluted the same glorious May dawnings. They spread themselves in joyous fellowship over that wide land of milk and honey, with its great fields of white clover and its orchards cloudy pink with bloom. To them the world was wholly good, was inexhaustibly bounteous. They bowed their heads together over the same blossoms in kindred blissful ecstasies. They stopped on petal edges for tremulous seconds of exulting felicitations. And side by side they winged in drowsy thankfulness homeward through the perfumed dusk. Of sermons written in bitterness and listened to in fury they took no heed, they had no care.

But ten days before the first of those tortured sermons was due Gallinger was suddenly called away. Hannah Ann had been forbidden to have any communications with Mrs. Cruikshank by Miss Deborah, who was careful of her father’s reputation even to the distant and outlying skirts of it. But when wash is being hung out in neighboring back yards, there are established two wireless-telegraph stations which must communicate by the inevitable laws of nature itself. And thus the Rev. Mr. Hutchison learned that night that the lawyer had gone to Chicago on business, and would be absent for a week or more !

With a heart full of infinite relief the old man resumed his place at his study window. Once more Gallinger’s bees stood to him only for inspiration. For hours from desk to bookcase and from bookcase back to desk he strode again in ardent declamation, and there was none to interrupt him. The series rose again phœnix - like. It was strong with eloquence and grace. He had come to Honeyville pitifully aware that many had thought him too old for the service. He would show them — to the greater glory of the service, he would show them — if power were not still in him!

Gallinger, not expected until Saturday, came back Thursday morning. But the last three days of the week were dark and rainy, and he was kept indoors. Old Mr. Hutchison, on the eve of the day which called for the first of them, saw his hard-wrought, but surpassing bee sermons in full completion.

II.

The story of that first bee sermon is soon told. Indeed it shall not here be told at all. After the three days of cloud and downpour, Sunday morning opened fair and hot; and by ten o’clock that thing was beginning to happen which almost any one in the Bethesda congregation could have told their pastor would assuredly happen! For not only was it the Seventh Day, which for the last thousand years bees seem sacrilegiously to have set aside for their most riotously public celebrations, but, much more than that, it was the first fine morning since Wednesday, and this in swarming week! By church time, all over the village and throughout the country for leagues around, there was let loose such a pent-up, hundred-fold bacchanalia of emptied hives from half the bee-yards of the township as drowned all sound of church bells, and, for half the Bethesdans, completely precluded all thoughts of attending the morning service.

The Rev. Amos still kept his good old-fashioned notions as to a proper Sabbath deportment, and on the way from the parsonage to the vestry looked neither to the right nor to the left; had he done so, he might not have found himself gazing down from his pulpit upon a miserable expanse of half-empty benches, with no explanation whatever to salve his sorely injured feelings. His first bee sermon seemed likely to be most of all memorable for the number of bee-keeping Methodists who did not hear it. The Judsons were all away. Of the Tuppers, only the ten year old twins were in evidence. Not a McPherson had been able to come. Of the stout tribe of Harpers, the old grandmother and the little girls alone made their appearance. Indeed, one might have gone through the list of pews as Homer went through the heroic catalogue of Trojan ships, — only instead of telling who were in them, telling who were not.

But it was not long until Deacon Snow, firm in his accustomed place by the pile of collection plates in the front seat, marked the old man’s trouble; and rising solemnly, he tiptoed up the pulpit stairs and whispered to him. In a moment the woeful knot on the face of the Rev. Amos relaxed into an expanding beam of relief and comprehension. And when he arose to make the announcements, he announced for his own part that “owing to the reprehensible conduct of the bees themselves, and the consequent absence of so many of the congregation, the first of the bee sermons would be postponed until the Sunday following.” Then, with a perceptible, underlying anxiety, — for he could not think of all those scores of colonies that must everywhere be so anarchically misconducting themselves without certain worrying reflections of his own, — he began an old discourse upon the Prodigal Son.

He was just about to add his “lastly, ” when, framed in the open porch door, he caught sight of the wildly fluttered face of Hannah Ann ! She ducked back, but a minute later showed herself again, — disappeared, — reappeared, — disappeared. She was not one of those who found it easy to profane the sanctuary. She did it indeed in fiery - visaged misery. But it was plain, too, that she was under the wretched necessity of continuing to do it until she had called forth her reverend master.

Mr. Hutchison stopped. He realized what had happened with quaking certainty, yet he yielded to the temptation to put it off on some unknown and greater trouble. “I, I fear there is immediate need of me at the parsonage, ” he gasped. Miss Deborah’s mouth fell open with amazement. “ Brother Snow, will you be so very good as to bring the service to a close for me ? I regret — I regret exceedingly — if at all possible I shall return at once. I — I ” —

Two minutes later he was breathlessly entering his back garden. The air was thick, vibrant, and singing with bees. One of his own colonies and one of Gallinger’s had left the hive almost at the same moment. The former swarm had swayed uncertainly out of bounds as it rose, and the two whirling vortices of intoxicated Italians had spun inextricably together. A dwarf Astrakhan stood just inside the lawyer’s fence. And now they were settling upon a lower branch of it in one great, teeming, brown garland, like some instant and monstrous growth of Spanish moss.

Gallinger, too, had been away, taking his Sunday morning tramp down along the river; and Mrs. Cruikshank had rushed after him in a trepidation hardly less than that of Hannah Ann. She met him returning, and he arrived on the scene only a few seconds behind Mr. Hutchison. For minute after minute the latter stood, with ears deadened by that apian hurricane, gaping in blank hopelessness over the fence at the amazingly festooned Astrakhan. And when he lowered his eyes he found them looking into the lawyer’s astonished but still sardonic countenance.

In the Rev. Amos it was as much an instinct to be unselfish as to be selfish would have been in the majority of mankind. “They ’re yours, sir,” he cried, forlornly desperate, — “they ’re all yours! I don’t dispute your right in the slightest! ”

“ Mine ! Mine for why? ” — such childlike simplicity and such uncalledfor generosity were alike new things to Cyrus F. ; and, in spite of himself, no little of the crabbedness went from that testy, cross-examining voice of his. “Both swarms are there. I ’ll take my own, but I don’t want yours. It ’s only a matter of separating them. Come in and help, — or, if you don’t want to, I can do it alone.”

“ Only a matter of separating them! ” The old man hurried around by the front way, and entered Gallinger’s bee-yard dazedly wiping his temples. The lawyer’s high, thick, locust hedge hid them from the street.

“Huh! ” grunted Cyrus F., stooped over the swarming sheet he was spreading under the great, crawling “pear ” of bees, — “huh! So you ’re anxious to give away an A 1 swarm of Italians, are you ? ” But his crustiness might now almost have been called good-natured. He twisted about, and peered up darkly through the black silk “muffle ” which dropped from hat brim to shoulders. “ Why, where are your gloves and veil ? ”

“I — I did think of them, but it’s — it’s the Sabbath, and it seemed too much like deliberately making ready for a morning’s work. If ” —

“But, my Lord, you don’t exactly hunger and thirst to be stung, do you ? ”

“No,” said the old man, flushing. “No, I don’t. But I’d rather feel right with myself than not be.” The bees were about him in hundreds; it was a wonder he had not been already attacked.

The lawyer shut his lips tight, but it was with the kind of hopeless exasperation which is ready to burst into a laugh. What was stranger than that, the Rev. Amos had just given utterance to a sentiment which should have been a red rag to him, and he found himself liking him for it! “All right,” he growled, — “but I don’t just see how you ’re going to be able to help me much without them.”

That gave old Mr. Hutchison pause. “Then, then I shall put them on,” he said, “for a man’s neighbor-duty comes before the Sabbath.”

And this unexpected article of faith, too, had its own effect on Gallinger. Moreover, he had won his point. “ Mrs. Cruikshank,” he shouted ferociously, “when you ’re ready with that smoker, bring out my other veil and gloves for Mr. Hutchison.”

Then he hurried across the yard and into his carpenter-shop. When he came back again, bearing a new hive under each arm, the minister was in his bee clothes.

Gallinger set the clean little gray houses corner to corner at right angles on the end of the sheet. “You ’ll have to take one of my hives, ” he said; he was not used to giving, and his awkwardness betrayed itself in a reddening return to crustiness. “It ’s a homemade article, but if it suits you, you ’re welcome to keep it.”

The Rev. Amos was deprecating in a minute.

“Well, you ’ll have to take it for the present, anyway; and I think you’d better take it for good. I suppose your ’neighbor-duty ’ idea can work both ways, can’t it? ” Then a sudden, galling suspicion came to him. “But perhaps, ” — and all the old scornful viciousness came back into his voice, — “perhaps you ’d consider it polluted, contaminated, infected, eh? eh?”

“Why, sir! Mr. Gallinger!” The old minister’s flaming tones were proof enough of his sincerity. “What right have you to think me such a bigot? Such a thought never for one moment ” —

“All right, all right, all right! I apologize. Now let’s get to work.”

The all-surrounding, rip-saw whizzing of the myriads of rampant Italians had gradually died down. For, thousand after thousand,they were adding themselves to the huge, fermenting mother-core. And it hung there with the slumberous hum of some gigantic, sleeping top.

Gallinger caught the smoker from Mrs. Cruikshank, and now on this side, now on that, began to pour into the swarm the cedar-bark bee chloroform. And he did it with such methodical thoroughness that it gave him time to talk. “You know,” he ran on morosely, “we shouldn’t have let this thing happen at all. It’s well enough for the villagers to go on allowing their hives to split up as the whim takes them, — indeed it ’s only in the last few years that they’ve got away from ’bee gums, ’ and sulphur massacres by way of ’extracting ’ in the fall. Controlled swarming is a century ahead of them yet.” He had a smudge going now like a spring rubbish-burning. “What system did Stevenson give you? ”

“ What system ? Why, really, I don’t think I understand. Do you mean to say that you can make your bees swarm when you please ? ”

“Well, if I can’t exactly do that, I can keep them from swarming when I don’t please. So can any scientific beeman. I wonder Stevenson did n’t think to explain the thing to you. Better let me show you to-morrow. It ’ll save you a lot of trouble. If I’d looked through my hives half carefully before I went to Chicago this bunch here would have been only half as big. But I reckon it’s about ripe for hiving, now.” He abruptly handed the smoker over to the old minister. “ Just keep that trained on them.”

Nimbly catching up his swarming basket, he lifted it in the hollow of his left arm till the bottom of it was just beneath the tip of the huge brown cluster, and with his right hand took firm hold of the burdened branch. Then, with a sudden, powerful, downward jerk, he dropped the whole double swarm into the awaiting hamper, and as swiftly and surely lowered it to the ground.

The Rev. Amos, his hands shaking with an old man’s nervous haste, instantly turned the stupefying smudge into it. But a legion of raging Italians poured out of it in a delirious cloud. It seemed to him that the basket was a crucible, full of some new kind of fused and molten metal. And now Gallinger with absolute steadiness of hands tilted the crucible and emptied its contents upon the swarming sheet!

From the seething central mound the hundred thousand bees flowed savagely out in all directions. Before the smoke could once more get the upper hand there had spun up a rabid dust-storm of them. About the heads of the two men it was a very typhoon. The whole garden was dun and swirling with the fierce, living spindrift. The clouded glare of the midday sun seemed only the heat from that burning frenzy. Yet, even so, the number on the canvas seemed in no wise diminished. And old Mr. Hutchison, half blinded, and with face a-steam under the stifling veil, kept the bellows going like the piston of a record-breaking locomotive. As for Cyrus F., he was rapidly running his eyes back and forth over the sheet, and his breath came short in his smothered excitement. “If we can only find both queens, now, ” he said; and flinging off his gloves, he thrust both hands into the brothy, amber mat, and began to ferret and dig and plough through it, as if it had been so much warm sand!

If it had really been the molten metal the Rev. Amos had fancied it, he could not have been more astoundedly impressed. “God bless me!” he gasped, and turned pale. Then, grasped inexorably by his flint-hearted sense of duty, he mercilessly forced himself to follow. Pulling off his own gloves, with set teeth he let himself down beside the lawyer.

“Why — why,” — the latter went into a raspy sputter, — “my heavens! I was n’t asking you to do this. You ’re not used to them. You ’ll be ” —

“Father! Father!” The agonized shrieking, subdued to a Sabbath Day pitch, but none the less horrified for that, came from Miss Deborah. She had that moment returned from church and mounted a chair by the parsonage fence. “Father, what are you thinking of? You’ll be stung to death! Come away this minute! I should think, Mr. Gallinger, you ’d make him come! Mrs. Cruikshank, you pull him away! And ” — (as bitterly as tearfully) — “you ’re setting a nice example for Sunday, I must say, or for any other day, either! ”

The Rev. Mr. Hutchison straightened his back with a dignity that was full of wrath. “Daughter,” he said, “daughter, go into the house. I may not be of much assistance to Mr. Gallinger, but I can at least show him that I appreciate kindness. It has been my loss not to have known such a neighbor before. He has done for me what few would do.” And the Rev. Amos indignantly stooped again by Cyrus F.

Upon the latter his tribute had fallen with an effect of outward shame and inward glow. But he had little time for his emotions. For he had barely laid down the smoker with which, through the short family controversy, he had been busily “ re-seasoning ” the neglected bees than his eyes fell upon the first of the queens. Instantly and deftly he scooped the slender royal dame into his palm, “ balled ” her about protectingly with a handful of her subjectworkers, and deposited them with all gentleness on the entrance board of one of the empty hives. For one moment of suspicion she hesitated, then started in. And the workers followed fast after her. Gallinger swiftly swept another handful along the sheet behind them, then another and another.

Had Cyrus F. been less intent upon the establishment of his “current ” he would have seen the old man beside him wince and suck in his breath again and again; for bees are woefully quick to recognize and resent the touch of the novice. But the Rev. Amos was not made of the stuff that falters, and though all the fires of the Inferno seemed to be roasting his hands from wrists to fingertips, he continued to rake and run them through the twisting, writhing swarm. And in five minutes more he had his reward ; he found the second queen.

Gallinger pounced upon her in triumph, and on the moment caught sight of the old man’s hands. “Why, good Lord! — Mrs. Cruikshank! No, you go in to her ! She ’ll ease the worst of it with ammonia. No, — go on ! Our job ’s all but done.” He almost pushed him in.

As he went again to start the current into the second hive, he muttered, “The old boy must have learned his letters from Fox’s Book of Martyrs! It beats me! ”

When Mr. Hutchison issued from the Gallinger kitchen fifteen minutes later his neighbor was just reëntering the bee-yard. Hanging from his arm was a second swarming sheet, and one of the new hives had gone from the first. “I thought I ’d better set it up for you,” he said ; “and now if you care to drop in on me to-morrow night I ’ll show you how to avoid any further trouble. ”

“I shall,—I shall most gladly,” and the Rev. Amos reached with a rush of eagerness for the lawyer’s hand. His own aching fingers were shot through with pains at Gallinger’s grip, as if from hot water after frost bite, but his heart was rejoicing in him.

The Rev. Mr. Hutchison spent Monday evening with Cyrus F. Gallinger, and he stayed late. For of bees the old minister still had much to learn; and, as they opened hive after hive together in the dusk by the lawyer’s lantern, the latter taught him. Moreover, not only were many mysterious secret places of the hive made plain, but in the after frankness there was cleared up a certain matter of troubled and troublesome week-day discourses, — which the Rev. Amos heard of with amazement, and most contritely promised he should do no more offending in the future; and a slight mutual adjustment of bee and sermon hours was a guaranteeing supplement to his promise.

On Tuesday evening Gallinger called upon the Rev. Amos, and from the latter’s first two hives all unnecessary queen-cells were removed. And, since all bee-keepers are brothers, — whether they learn it late or soon, — when long after eleven they said good-by, a number of other things had been removed as well.

They saw each other again Friday, and Mrs. Cruikshank, in her room above the kitchen, heard the last of their conversation that night. She had been with Cyrus F. for half his life, and what she heard him saying galvanized her to a sitting posture in one jerk. “And why should I not, pray ? ” he was arguing with his familiar fierce pugnacity. “It seems to me that in attempting to dissuade me from going to church you ’re not exactly in character, sir. No, sir, you’ve listened to me; now I ’m going to give myself the pleasure of listening to you. ‘ I’m in a better position to preach bee sermons than you are?’ Nonsense, fiddlesticks! I’ve dealt with nothing but the science, the dry-bones of the matter. I ’ve ignored everything else, — like a bigot; for I tell you there’s as much bigotry in science as there is in — in religion. No, sir, I ’m for truth and light, sir, — all I can get of it, — and I ’m going to hear your series if I turn the whole village upside down over it! ”

Thus it was that next Sunday morning there sat in a far corner of the Honeyville Methodist Church Cyrus F. Gallinger, — at whom the congregation gaped! But the Rev. Mr. Hutchison, though there was within him a certain nervousness which only Cyrus F. himself could have understood, preached that first sermon of the famous series, beaming upon him!

Arthur E. McFarlane.