was sent from heaven, and had wandered a thousand years in the hair of
Shiv before flowing down upon the plains with beauty and plenty and
healing for sin-spent man--Bedient instantly comprehended the meaning
of the figure: that the hair of Shiv was the Himalayas, whose peaks
continually rape the rain-clouds. And the lotos--name, fragrance and
sight of this flower--started a little lyrical wheel tinkling in his
mind, turning off snatches of verses that sung themselves; and
fluttering bits of romance, half-religious and altogether impersonal;
and strange pictures, lovely, though all but effaced.

Indeed, he was one with the Hindus in a love for the bees, the silence,
the mountains, rivers, the moon, and the heaven-protected cattle, in
whose great soft eyes he found the completion of animal peace.... The
legend that the bees had come from Venus, with the perfect cereal,
wheat, as patterns of perfection from that farther evolved
planet--fascinated, became the _leit-motif_ of his thoughts for weeks.
Earth had earned a special dispensation, it was said, and bright
messengers came with a swarm and a sheaf, each milleniums advanced
beyond any species of its kind here.

From a little boy he had loved the bees. Afternoons long ago (this was
clear to him as the memory of that sinister hall-way of yellow-green
light which returned on the afternoon of the great wind) he had lain
upon the grass somewhere, and heard the hum of the honey-gatherers in
thistle and clover. The hum was like the far singing of a child-choir,
and the dreamings it started then were altogether too big for the
memory mechanism of a little boy's head; but the vastness and wonder of
those dreamings left a kind of bushed beauty far back in his mind. He
had loved the bees as he had loved the _Bhagavad Gita_, thinking it
peculiarly his own attraction, but when the world's great poets and