Ralph Peden had come out into the morning air, with his note-book
and a volume which he had been studying all the way from
Edinburgh. As he lay at length among the grass he conned it over
and over. He referred to passages here and there. He set out very
calmly with that kind of determination with which a day's work in
the open air with a book is often begun. Not for a moment did he
break the monotony of his study. The marshalled columns of strange
letters were mowed down before him.

A great humble-bee, barred with tawny orange, worked his way up
from his hole in the bank, buzzing shrilly in an impatient,
stifled manner at finding his dwelling blocked as to its exit by a
mountainous bulk. Ralph Peden rose in a hurry. The beast seemed to
be inside his coat. He had instinctively hated bees and everything
that buzzed ever since as a child he had made experiments with the
paper nest of a tree-building wasp. The humble-bee buzzed a little
more, discontentedly, thought of going back, crept out at last
from beneath the Hebrew Lexicon, and appeared to comb his hair
with his feeler. Then he slowly mounted along the broad blade of a
meadow fox-tail grass, which bent under him as if to afford him an
elastic send-off upon his flight. With a spring he lumbered up,
taking his way over the single field which separated his house
from the edge of the Grannoch water--where on the other side,
above the glistening sickle-sweep of sand which looked so
inviting, yet untouched under the pines by the morning sun, the
hyacinths lay like a blue wreath of peat smoke in the hollows of
the wood.

But there was a whiff of real peat smoke somewhere in the air, and
Ralph Peden, before he returned to his book, was aware of the