f food with the ancients than
it is with us. As they appear to have been unacquainted with sugar,
honey, no doubt, stood them instead. It is too rank and pungent for the
modern taste; it soon cloys upon the palate. It demands the appetite of
youth, and the strong, robust digestion of people who live much in
the open air. It is a more wholesome food than sugar, and modern
confectionery is poison beside it. Beside grape sugar, honey contains
manna, mucilage, pollen, acid, and other vegetable odoriferous
substances and juices. It is a sugar with a kind of wild natural bread
added. The manna of itself is both food and medicine, and the pungent
vegetable extracts have rare virtues. Honey promotes the excretions and
dissolves the glutinous and starchy impedimenta of the system.

Hence it is not without reason that with the ancients a land flowing
with milk and honey should mean a land abounding in all good things;
and the queen in the nursery rhyme, who lingered in the kitchen to eat
"bread and honey" while the "king was in the parlor counting out his
money," was doing a very sensible thing. Epaminondas is said to have
rarely eaten anything but bread and honey. The Emperor Augustus one day
inquired of a centenarian how he had kept his vigor of mind and body so
long; to which the veteran replied that it was by "oil without and honey
within." Cicero, in his "Old Age," classes honey with meat and milk and
cheese as among the staple articles with which a well-kept farm-house
will be supplied.

Italy and Greece, in fact all the Mediterranean countries, appear to
have been famous lands for honey. Mount Hymettus, Mount Hybla, and
Mount Ida produced what may be called the classic honey of antiquity, an
article doubtless in nowise superior to our best products. Leigh Hunt's
"Jar of Honey" is mainly distilled from Sicilian history and literature,
Theocritus furnishing the best yield. Sicily has always been rich in
bees. Swinburne (the traveler of a hundred years ago) says the woods on
this island abounded in wild honey, and that the people also had many
hives near their houses. The idyls of Theocritus are native to the
island in this respect, and abound in bees--"Flat-nosed bees" as he
calls them in the Seventh Idyl--and comparisons in which comb-honey is
the standard of the most delectable of this world's goods. His goatherds
can think of no greater bliss than that the mouth be filled with
honey-combs, or to be inclosed in a chest li