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
prophets became known to him through their writings, he discovered,
again with glad emotion, that bees had stirred the fancy of each,
stimulated their conceptions of service and communistic blessedness;
furnished their symbols for laws of beauty and cleanliness,
brotherhood, race-spirit, the excellence of sacrifice--a thousand
perfect analogies to show the way of human ethics and ideal
performance.... But beyond all their service to literature, he
perceived that these masters among men had _loved_ the bees. This was
the only verb that conveyed Bedient's feelings for them; and he found
that they literally swarmed through Hindu simile in its expressions of
song and story and faith.

Northward, he made his leisure way almost to the borders of Kashmir,
before he found his place of abode--Preshbend, a little town of many
Sikhs, which clung like a babe to the sloping hip of a mountain. He was
taken on by the English of the forestry service, and liked the ranging
life; liked, too, the rare meetings with his fellow-workers and
superiors, quiet, steady-eyed men, quick-handed and slow of speech.
With all his growth and knowledge of the finer sort, Bedient carried no
equipment for earning a living--except through his hands. There was no
hesitation with him in making a choice--between patrolling a forest,
and the columns of a ledger. All the indoor ways of making money that
intervene between the artisan and artist were to him out of the
question. When asked his occupation, he had answered, "Cook."

One week in each month he spent in the town, and he came to love
Preshbend and the people; the tall young men, many taller than he, and
the great lean-armed, gaunt-breasted Sikh women. The boys were so
studious, so simple and gentle, compared with the fe