late sun to their night-long labours-I have sought instruction
from the Bees, and tried to appropriate to myself the old
industrious lesson.

And yet, hang it all, who by rights should be the teachers and
who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian
insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of
Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless
factories, might they not learn at last--might I not finally
teach them--a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the
shining hour?




_The Wheat_


The Vicar, whom I met once or twice in my walks about the
fields, told me that he was glad that I was taking an interest
in farming. Only my feeling about wheat, he said, puzzled him.

Now the feeling in regard to wheat which I had not been able to
make clear to the Vicar was simply one of amazement. Walking one
day into a field that I had watched yellowing beyond the trees,
I found myself dazzled by the glow and great expanse of gold. I
bathed myself in the intense yellow under the intense blue sky;
how dim it made the oak trees and copses and all the rest of the
English landscape seem! I had not remembered the glory of the
Wheat; nor imagined in my reading that in a country so far from