"Industry," the beekeeper said, "is the only true path to God's grace."

I watched from a distance, standing under the rattling leaves of a poplar tree. The man, despite his pious words, looked more devil than angel to me. He wore thick gloves and a wicker helmet draped to the shoulders with dusty burlap sacking. His leather apron, wax- and honey-smeared, clung to his chest like an eel-skin.

"Nothing is earned except by good, honest labour," said he, testing the weight of each throbbing hive. "The Bible has it so"--and here a smile showed in the gap between the pleats of burlap sacking--"but pray don’t ask me to say precisely where."

He plucked a dish of smouldering grass from the ground and swept it round the first straw skep, painting the hive with his sweet smoke. A few lone bees emerged to buzz about his covered head, but though I looked for the rest to turn angry and swarm from the hive like seamen from a burning sloop, the bees inside were still. I wiped a trickle of sweat from my lip and--heart jumping, thinking it a bee--slapped an ant from my moist bare thigh.

The beekeeper turned his head and smiled again. He was a large man, beefy and bulb-nosed, with the stance and slow movements of a bullock. In the heat of the spring afternoon, his cheeks shone wet and ruddy beneath the wicker helmet. He had the smell of beeswax about him--of beeswax and smoke and horseleather--which I liked. I had seen him once or twice in the town, and knew him to be a man of many trades: a lock-keeper, a grower of potatoes and roots, a street-corner Dissenter, and now a honey-man. I never knew his name.

He put aside the smoke-dish and lifted the skep from its wooden platform. This caused some mild perturbation in the hive, and I took a step back, though I stood distant enough to be safe, I thought. Then he reached within and brought out a comb, brimming with amber honey and deep-cobbled by bees. "There's them that will kill the bees to harvest their honey and wax, but I've not the heart for that," said he. He took a goose feather from his belt and gently brushed the bees from the comb.

"What's your name, boy?" he enquired of me then, eyes upon his work.

"William Merrick, sir."

"And do you go to school, William Merrick?"

"I do. Though I have a tutor as well--my older cousin, an educated man--whose attentions I share with my brothers."

"And does this cousin teach you your Bible verses so you have them all by heart?"

I hesitated, wondering if it be best to lie and be caught out, or else to speak the truth and risk his disapproval. "Mr. Dooling—for such is my tutor's name, sir—he owns a fine old Bible, bound in red Morocco. He puts us to reading it whenever he needs an hour to himself."

The beekeeper laughed then--a deep, rasping growl. "You answer like a Norman, Master Merrick. Which is to say, you answer not at all." He placed the brushed honeycomb into a bucket and reached in for another. "But I was a boy once, too. I know there's better games than Bible-reading."

The time was early May, and the spring had run long and hot that year, with little rain. The grassy hills beyond the Exeter road showed sere and brittle in the sun, grazed by sheep and wild ponies kicking up the dust. Freed from lessons by the heat, I spent my afternoons aimlessly, scraping at the countryside for amusement. I chased hares, played jousting knight against the cattle, made daring leaps from haylofts, and bathed in the warm oily waters of mossy ponds. I was nine that year, and well-mannered—when it suited me.

"Have you tasted honey fresh from the hive, William Merrick?" the beekeeper asked. He was engaged now in brushing another comb. Bees clung to his arm, the feather, his helmet.

"No, sir."

"Come here, then."

I shifted on my feet. I was yet damp from my bathing and the shirt clung to my narrow, knobby chest. A bee, I knew, had thirst like any other creature's.

"Are you afraid?"

I nodded, and hung back.

He laughed. "That's a good lad. A little fear is not a bad thing when working with the bees. But there's fear and there's panic, y'know. Calm is what matters to the bees. Calm without fear is a peril, and fear without calm doubly so. But the man who can hold both at once within his breast will not be harmed. Do you believe me, William Merrick?"

"You are the honey-man, sir, and ought to know."

He grunted in satisfaction. "Good, good. Then there's something remarkable I wish to show you."

He replaced the skep on its platform and picked up the bucket of honeycombs. "Come along, then, if you're not too frightened."

He started down the hillside toward a gathering of barns and out-houses in the fields below. Curious now, I followed, skirting the little village of hives, yet keeping a distance from the beekeeper, too, as his clothes and bucket still shed strays at every swing of his arm. In a minute, we had reached his honey house, as he called it. He placed the bucket inside and peeled off the wicker helmet and shawl. His grey-black hair was matted and tussled like a wren’s nest atop his head.

"There comes a time," he said to me, "when bees, like men, must set out to try their fortunes in a new place. And, like men, they can easily be led. Or misled. Do you understand my words, boy?"

Impatient as I was with this didactic way of speaking—and eager to see the promised amazement, which I hoped might be some horrible, dead thing—I asked him: "Will you tell me next that men, like bees, can sting?"

He looked up sharply. But then, deciding my answer had no scorn in it, he merely shook his head. He shed his gloves and tossed them upon the hot yellow straw. Then he took from his pocket a few balls of beeswax. After first kneading them soft, he pushed them into his hair-clogged ears and nostrils. "You're a clever boy, William Merrick," he muttered--somewhat incomprehensibly, with his nose so stuffed. "Mind you don't overvalue your cleverness. To the soul it can be killing as the canker to the rose."

He beckoned me round the corner of the honey house. Again I followed, until we came upon an apple tree in the yard. It hummed like a church choir, and its limbs seemed as if wrapped up in a kind of furry pelt--which I recognized all at once, and with a start, as a swarm of bees, unhived, clinging to a joint in the boughs.

I stopped cold, but the old man went on toward the tree. As I watched, he reached into the seething mass and slowly pulled away an object--a small cage or box that had hung there by a leather strap. "The queen," said he, as he slung the box round his own neck, bees and all, and took a few steps from the tree.

He turned to face me. "'Tis simple as a proverb: They follow the object of their desire."

I looked on, astonished, as a cloud of bees rose from the apple tree. They moved across the intervening space, gathering then on the old man's aproned chest, his blown cheeks and stubbled chin. I gasped, seeing the future content of all my midnight horrors there before me, but the beekeeper only gave a nod.

"The calmness, William Merrick," said he, draped in that shawl of blind, teeming life. "You must learn the calmness, and thus conquer the fear."

I put a hand to my dry lips and—sighing—fainted dead away.

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