It was girt about with a tall hedge of hawthorn, smothered in snowlike blossom, with just that rosy tinge upon it which is the first hectic of decay. Beyond the hedge I could see, stretching aloft, green apple-boughs, whose full-blown posies were alive with the desperate humming energy of countless bees. There was a blue wisp of smoke trailing idly away from a chimney-stack, all that could be seen of the snug thatched cottage within; and there were voices, a leisurely baritone, a sudden peal of laughter high-pitched and obviously a woman’s, and now and then a bar or two of an old song sung in an intermittent, absent-minded way.
In one of the pauses of this song, I raised the latch of the gate. Its sharp click drew to its full lean height a figure at the end of the garden, which was bending down in the midst of a wilderness of hives. As the man came towards me coatless, his rolled-up shirt-sleeves baring wiry brown arms to the hot June sun, I took in all the busy, quiet picture. The red-tiled, winding path, the sea of old-fashioned garden-flowers on every hand, billows of lilac and red-may and laburnum, shadowy blue deeps of forget-me-not, scarlet tulips amidst them like lighthouses, and drifting shallows of amber mignonette. A decent house stood hard by, its windows bright and clean as diamond-facets. There was a gay flicker of linen on a line beyond. An old dog lolled in a straw-filled barrel. A cat kept company with a milk jug on the spotless doorstep. And everywhere there were beehives, each of a different harmonious shade of colour, not ranged in stilted rows, but scattered here and there in twos and threes in the orderless order beloved of bees and unsuburban men.
The bee-master had keen grey eyes, set deep in a sun-blackened, honest face, and the ever-ready tongue of him was that of the beeman all the world over. He was ripe and willing to talk of his work, explaining what he was, and what he had done, as we slowly wandered through his domain. He was a Londoner—he told me—at least, that was his fate half a dozen years ago—a City clerk, pale as the ledger-leaves that fluttered through his fingers from nine to six of the working day. And at home, in a dreary desert of housetops called Nunhead—whither may an unkind fate never lure me—his sisters sewed for a living, white-faced as himself. But one day, in an old second-hand book-shop, he lit upon a threepenny treasure—a book on the management of bees. He read it as his train crawled homeward on one stifling, freezing, fog-bound winter’s night; and there and then, in the mean, dirty cattle-box of a third-class carriage, in fancy the bee-garden was inaugurated, that has since developed into all I saw around me on that brave morning in June.