The bee-master closed the window behind its thick bee-proof curtains, and, putting his gun away in a corner, drew a comfortable high-backed settle near to the cheery blaze. Then he disappeared for a moment, and returned with a dusty cobweb-shrouded bottle, which he carried in a wicker cradle as a butler would bear priceless old wine. The cork came out with a ringing jubilant report, and the pale, straw-coloured liquid foamed into the glasses like champagne. It stilled at once, leaving the whole inner surface of the glass veneered with golden bells. The old bee-man held it up critically against the light.
“The last of 19–,” he said, regretfully. “The finest mead year in this part of the country for many a decade back. Most people have never tasted the old Anglo-Saxon drink that King Alfred loved, and probably Harold’s men made merry with on the eve of Hastings. So they can’t be expected to know that metheglin varies with each season as much as wine from the grape.”
Of the goodness of the liquor there admitted no question. It had the bouquet of a ripe Ribston pippin, and the potency of East Indian sherry thrice round the Horn. But its flavour entirely eluded all attempt at comparison. There was a suggestive note of fine old perry about it, and a dim reminder of certain almost colourless Rhenish wines, never imported, and only to be encountered in moments of rare and happy chance. Yet neither of these parallels came within a sunbeam’s length of the truth about this immaculate honey-vintage of Warrilow. Pondering over the liquor thus, the thought came to me that nothing less than a supreme occasion could have warranted its production to-day. And this conjecture was immediately verified. The bee-master raised his glass above his head.
“To the Bees of Warrilow!” he said, lapsing into the broad Sussex dialect, as he always did when much moved by his theme. “Forty-one years ago to-day the first stock I ever owned was fixed up out there under the old codlin-tree; and now there are two hundred and twenty of them. ’Twas before you were born, likely as not; and bee science has seen many changes since then. In those days there were nothing but the old straw skeps, and most bee-keepers knew as little about the inner life of their bees as we do of the bottom of the South Pacific. Now things are very different; but the improvement is mostly in the bee-keepers themselves. The bees are exactly as they always have been, and work on the same principles as they did in the time of Solomon. They go their appointed way inexorably, and all the bee-master can do is to run on ahead and smooth the path a little for them. Indeed, after forty odd years of bee-keeping, I doubt if the bees even realise that they are ‘kept’ at all. The bee-master’s work has little more to do with their progress than the organ-blower’s with the tune.”