Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/219

 her way out of her cell and comes walking out. But nobody goes to her or helps her very much, ’cause all of ’em are betting their money on the first one out.

"When the Queen that came out first sees another Queen has left her cell, it makes her awful mad. Right there the fight begins. They just go at it like I go at the Nice Child and Angel Face when I can see back in their eyes that they think maybe they’re going to mutiny on me. Only I stop when I got ’em licked. The young Queen doesn’t stop until she’s got the other Queen killed deader than anything and the workers carry her out to the bee cemetery.

“Then the young Queen wants to go on and kill every white nymph that’s sleeping in the rest of the cradles. Right then and there she wants to do it. But the workers and the scouts and the guards step up and they say, ‘No, you can’t do that. You have to go and find your King and come back ready to be the mother of the hive before you can do that.’

“So the young Queen rests up a few days and gets all ready, and one day when the weather is all bright and sunny, in the morning when the dew is on the flowers and the lark is on the wing and everything, like that morning Browning wrote about—the Bee Master made me learn it: that one about ‘God’s in His Heaven and all’s right in the world’; I expect your mother made you learn it, too—why, the new Queen goes to the door and she walks out of it backward. She goes away a little piece and she comes back to it three or four times. God told her to