ssed for little Maya
among the insects in a lovely summer world--a happy roving in
garden and meadow, occasional risks and many joys. For all that,
she often missed the companions of her early childhood and now
and again suffered a pang of homesickness, an ache of longing
for her people and the kingdom she had left. There were hours,
too, when she yearned for regular, useful work and association
with friends of her own kind.

However, at bottom she had a restless nature, little Maya had,
and was scarcely ready to settle down for good and live in the
community of the bees; she wouldn't have felt comfortable. Often
among animals as well as human beings there are some who cannot
conform to the ways of the others. Before we condemn them we
must be careful and give them a chance to prove themselves. For
it is not always laziness or stubbornness that makes them
different. Far from it. At the back of their peculiar urge is a
deep longing for something higher or better than what every-day
life has to offer, and many a time young runaways have grown up
into good, sensible, experienced men and women.

Little Maya was a pure, sensitive soul, and her attitude to the
big, beautiful world came of a genuine eagerness for knowledge
and a great delight in the glories of creation.

Yet it is hard to be alone even when you are happy, and the
more Maya went through, the greater became her yearning for
companionship and love. She was no longer so very young; she had
grown into a strong, superb creature with sound, bright wings,
a sharp, dangerous sting, and a highly developed sense of both
the pleasures and the hazards of her life. Through her own
experience she had gathered information and stored up wisdom,
which she now often wished she could apply to something of real
value. There were days when she was ready to return to the hive
and throw herself at the queen's feet and sue for pardon and
honorable reinstatement. But a great, burning desire held her
back--the desire to know human beings. She had heard so many
contradictory things about them that she was confused rather
than enlightened. Yet she had a feeling that in the whole of
creation there were no beings more powerful or more intelligent
or more sublime than they.

A few times in her wanderings she had seen people, but only from
afar, from high up in the air--big and little people, black
people, white people, red people, and such as dressed in many
colors. She had never ven