Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/182

178 Unwittingly he sometimes directed his disciples wrong; yet he labored faithfully in their service, nursing his didactic impulse carefully until he had given them, as well as he was able, an insight into the life of their pets. This store of sterner precepts conscientiously discharged, he turns most willingly to those of mythological suggestion, proceeding to tell his followers how to restock their apiaries, should they chance to lose all their bees. He gives as a practical measure to be followed, yet naming it a tradition withal, the old, old myth of bees springing from dead cattle, "how the tainted life-blood of a dead bullock has often borne bees;"—the same old riddle, "out of the strong came forth sweetness, and out of the eater came forth meat." Virgil says of it:

 First a place small and sheltered for this very purpose is chosen; This they enclose with a low roof of tiles and with walls, And they add four windows of slanting light toward the four winds. Then they seek a two-year old bullock, whose horns are just beginning to curve. His nostrils and his mouth are covered over Though he struggles greatly, and after he has been slain by blows, The battered entrails are crushed within the unbroken skin. Thus they leave him, laid in the enclosure, And they place under his sides branches of thyme and fresh wild cinnamon. This is done as soon as the driving zephyrs roughen the waves, Before the meadows brighten with new colors, Before the chattering swallow hangs her nest from the beams. Meanwhile the liquid, warmed in the young frame, heats And animals of a wonderful kind are to be seen, Lacking in feet at first, but soon whirring with wings; They mingle, and more and more take to the thin air, Until they have burst forth as a storm poured from summer clouds, Or as arrows from the vibrating bowstring, When the swift Parthians first begin to fight.

Thereupon he drops easily and contentedly into that vein of poetry that comes so gracefully from him, stringing upon a slender connecting thread the story of the loss and the recovery of Aristæus the shepherd's bees, into which he introduces the whole tale of Orpheus and Eurydice. With him, we accompany Aristæus on his pilgrimage for aid to his mother, a water-nymph, who sits spinning with her maidens of euphonious names, Drymo and Phyllodoce, Clio and Lycorias, Xantho and Beroe, in their translucent, glass-colored chamber in the depths of the sea, while one of their number recounts the "numerous lovers of the gods, from Chaos down." In his company we follow the fortunes of Aristæus to their happy conclusion, when, having obeyed the oracle, he is rewarded by seeing clouds of bees come forth on the ninth day from the bullocks that he has slain, and cluster at the top of a tree, ready to be hived.

Filled the marvelous charm of his closing pages, it is with an effort that we turn to consider the value of his discourse. It is a very