The bees kept very
_beesy_ all about us. To see one huge fellow, as big as three ordinary ones
with pieces of red and yellow about him, as if he were the beadle of all
bee-dom, and overgrown in consequence--to see him, I say, down in a little
tuft of white clover, rolling about in it, hardly able to move for fatness,
yet bumming away as if his business was to express the delight of the whole
creation--was a sight! Then there were the butterflies, so light that they
seemed to tumble up into the air, and get down again with difficulty. They
bewildered me with their inscrutable variations of purpose. "If I could but
see once, for an hour, into the mind of a butterfly," I thought, "it would
be to me worth all the natural history I ever read. If I could but see why
he changes his mind so often and so suddenly--what he saw about that flower
to make him seek it--then why, on a nearer approach, he should decline
further acquaintance with it, and go rocking away through the air, to do
the same fifty times over again--it would give me an insight into all
animal and vegetable life that ages of study could not bring me up to." I
was thinking all this behind my daughter's umbrella, while a lark, whose
body had melted quite away in the heavenly spaces, was scattering bright
beads of ringing melody straight down upon our heads; while a cock was
crowing like a clarion from the home-farm, as if in defiance of the golden
glitter of his silent brother on the roof of the stable; while a little
stream that scampered down the same slope as the lawn lay upon, from a well
in the stable-yard, mingled its sweet undertone of contentment with the
jubilation of the lark and the business-like hum of the bees; and while
white clouds floated in the majesty of silence across the blue deeps of the
heavens.
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