burst of thunder and lightning startled him for a moment; but he was proceeding to cross, when his ears tingled, his head turned giddy, and while the earth heaved beneath his feet, he saw the opposite side of the glen lifted up with a horrible deafening noise, and then the cottage itself, with all around it, cast, as he thought, to the ground, and buried for ever. The sturdy youth, for the first time in his life, fainted away. When his senses returned, he found himself pitched back into his own premises, but not injured, the blow having been broken by the vines.

But on looking in horror towards the site of the cottage up the hill, what did he see there? or rather, what did he not see there? And what did he see, forming a new mound, furlongs down the side of the hill, almost at the bottom of the glen, and in his own homestead?

Antonio's cottage:-Antonio's cottage, with the almondtrees, and the bee-hives, and the very cat and dog, and the old man himself, and the daughter (both senseless), all come, as if, in the father's words, to beg him to accept them! Such awful pleasantries, so to speak, sometimes take place in the middle of Nature's deepest tragedies, and such exquisite good may spring out of evil.

The old

For it was so in the end, if not in the intention. man (who, together with his daughter, had only been stunned by terror) was superstitiously frightened by the dreadful circumstance, if not affectionately moved by the attentions of the son of his old friend, and the delight and religious transport of his child. Besides, though the cottage and the almondtrees, and the bee-hives, had all come miraculously safe down the hill (a phenomenon which has frequently occurred in these extraordinary landslips), the flower-gardens, on which his bees

fed, were almost all destroyed; his property was lessened, his pride lowered; and when the convulsion was well over, and the guitars were again playing in the valley, he consented to become the inmate, for life, of the cottage of the enchanted couple.

He could never attain, however, to the innate delicacy of his child, and he would sometimes, with a petulant sigh, intimate at table what a pity it was that she had not married the rich and high-feeding citizen. At such times as these, Maria would gather one of her husband's feet between her own under the table, and with a squeeze of it that repaid him tenfold for the mortification, would steal a look at him which said, "I possess all which it is possible for me to desire."

13

CHAPTER XI.

THE

BEES.

BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE SUFFICIENTLY EXPRESSED.-BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE.-THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN POET.-WAXEN TAPERS.-A BEE DRAMA. MASSACRES OF DRONES.-HUMAN PROGRESSION.

science which appear to be settled-nay, even most settledsome new theory is coming up every day, in these extraordinary times, to compel us to think the points over again, and doubt whether we are quite so knowing as we supposed. Not only are bee-masters disputing the discoveries of Huber respecting the operations of the hive, but searchers into nature seem almost prepared to re-open the old question respecting the equivocal generation of the bee, and set the electrical experiments of Mr. Cross at issue with the conclusions of Redi.

How this may turn out, we know not; but sure we are, that it will be a long time indeed before the praise and glory of the bee can have exhausted its vocabulary-before people cry out to authors, "Say no more; you have said too much already of its wonderfulness-too much of the sweetness and beauty of its productions." Too much, we are of opinion, cannot be said of any marvel in nature, unless it be trivial or false. The old prosaical charge against hyperbolical praises of the beautiful, we hold to be naught. Ask a lover, and he will say, and say truly, that no human terms can do justice to the sweetness in his mistress's eyes-to the virgin bloom on her cheek. If words could equal them, Nature would hardly be our superior. Hear what is said on the point by Marlowe :

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If all the pens that ever poets held,

Had fed the feelings of their master's thoughts
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit:
If these had made one's poem's period,

And all combined in beauty's worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest."

Did any one ever sufficiently admire the entire elegance of the habits and pursuits of bees? their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least adulterated odour; their avoidance of everything squalid (so unlike flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in the instance of carcases of intruders, which, if they cannot drag away, they cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate neighbourhoods, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they issue forth to their work as if they had had nothing to do with it; their combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which they make their apartments, and which is used by mankind for none but patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy; their delight in sunshine; their attention to one another; their apparent indifference to everything purely regarding themselves, apart from the common good? A writer of elegant Italian verse, who recast the book of Virgil on Bees, has taken occasion of their supposed dislike of places abounding in echoes, to begin his poem with a pretty conceit. He was one of the first of his countrymen who ventured to dispense with rhyme; and he makes the bees themselves send him a deputation, on purpose to admonish him not to use it :