ome bold
hearts tiptoed out of the waiting-rooms over the loud gravel with the
consciously modest air of men leaving church, climbed the wooden
staircase to the bridge, and so reached my level, where the
inexhaustible bonnet-boxes were still vomiting squadrons and platoons.
There was little need to bid them descend. They had wrapped their heads
in handkerchiefs, so that they looked like the disappointed dead
scuttling back to Purgatory. Only one old gentleman, pontifically draped
in a banner embroidered 'Temperance and Fortitude,' ran the gauntlet
up-street, shouting as he passed me, 'It's night or Bluecher, Mister.'
They let him in at the White Hart, the pub. where I should have
bought the beer.

After this the day sagged. I fell to reckoning how long a man in a
Turkish bath, weakened by excessive laughter, could live without food,
and specially drink; and how long a disenfranchised bee could hold out
under the same conditions.

Obviously, since her one practical joke costs her her life, the bee can
have but small sense of humour; but her fundamentally dismal and
ungracious outlook on life impressed me beyond words. She had paralysed
locomotion, wiped out trade, social intercourse, mutual trust, love,
friendship, sport, music (the lonely steam-organ had run down at last),
all that gives substance, colour or savour to life, and yet, in the
barren desert she had created, was not one whit more near to the
evolution of a saner order of things. The Heavens were darkened with the
swarms' divided counsels; the street shimmered with their purposeless
sallies. They clotted on tiles and gutter-pipes, and began frenziedly to
build a cell or two of comb ere they discovered that their queen was
not with them; then flung off to seek her, or whirled, dishevelled and
insane, into another hissing nebula on the false rumour that she was
there. I scowled upon them with disfavour, and a massy, blue
thunder-head rose majestically from behind the elm-trees of Sumtner
Barton Rectory, arched over and scowled with me. Then I realised that it
was not bees nor locusts that had darkened the skies, but the on-coming
of the malignant English thunderstorm--the one thing before which even
Deborah the bee cannot express her silly little self.

'Aha! _Now_ you'll catch it,' I said, as the herald gusts set the big
drum rolling down the street like a box-kite. Up and up yearned the dark
cloud, till the first lightning quivered and cut. Deborah cowered