e fact that the wasp and the bee are more like
human beings than mosquitoes and have more or less the same habits of
nocturnal rest. As we sit in the garden, however, the mind is bound to
speculate, and to revolve such questions as whether this hum of
insects that delights us is in itself delightful, whether its
delightfulness depends on its surroundings, or whether it depends on
its associations with past springs.

Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentially
beautiful a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea. Even
these have been criticised, especially by persons who suffer from
sleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of
mankind. These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for
giving us pleasure--a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of
instruments. It may be that on hearing them we become a part of some
universal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes
in some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in love
with life and these are the millionfold chorus of life--the magnified
echo of his own pleasure in being alive. At the same time, our
pleasure in the hum of insects is also, I think, a pleasure of
reminiscence. It reminds us of other springs and summers in other
gardens. It reminds us of the infinite peace of childhood when on a
fine day the world hardly existed beyond the garden-gate. We can smell
moss-roses--how we loved them as children!--as a bee swings by. Insect
after insect dances through the air, each dying away like a note of
music, and we see again the border of pinks and the strawberries, and
the garden paths edged with box, and the old dilapidated wooden seat
under the tree, and an apple-tree in the long grass, and a stream
beyond the apple-tree, and all those things that made us infinitely
happy as children when we were in the country--happier than we were
ever made by toys, for we do not remember any toys so intensely as we
remember the garden and the farm. We had the illusion in those days
that it was going to last for ever. There was no past or future. There
was nothing real except the present in which we lived--a present in
which all the human beings were kind, in which a dim-sighted
grandfather sang songs (especially a song in which the chorus began
"Free and easy"), in which aunts brought us animal biscuits out of
town, in which there was neither man-servant nor maid-servant, neither
ox nor