their mouths, by which they would symbolize the hope that their love
may be as sweet to their souls as honey to the palate.

It was fabled that Homer was suckled by a priestess whose breasts
distilled honey; and that once, when Pindar lay asleep, the bees
dropped honey upon his lips. In the Old Testament the food of the
promised Immanuel was to be butter and honey (there is much doubt about
the butter in the original), that he might know good from evil; and
Jonathan's eyes were enlightened by partaking of some wood or wild
honey: "See, I pray you, how mine eyes have been enlightened, because I
tasted a little of this honey." So far as this part of his diet was
concerned, therefore, John the Baptist, during his sojourn in the
wilderness, his divinity-school days in the mountains and plains of
Judea, fared extremely well. About the other part, the locusts, or, not
to put too fine a point on it, the grasshoppers, as much cannot be
said, though they were among the creeping and leaping things the
children of Israel were permitted to eat. They were probably not eaten
raw, but roasted in that most primitive of ovens, a hole in the ground
made hot by building a fire in it. The locusts and honey may have been
served together, as the Bedas of Ceylon are said to season their meat
with honey. At any rate, as the locust is often a great plague in
Palestine, the prophet in eating them found his account in the general
weal, and in the profit of the pastoral bees; the fewer locusts, the
more flowers. Owing to its numerous wild-flowers, and flowering shrubs,
Palestine has always been a famous country for bees. They deposit their
honey in hollow trees, as our bees do when they escape from the hive,
and in holes in the rocks, as ours do not. In a tropical or semi-
tropical climate, bees are quite apt to take refuge in the rocks; but
where ice and snow prevail, as with us, they are much safer high up in
the trunk of a forest tree.