his escape.  During sleep he was conveyed by fairies to Cairo, and substituted for an ugly groom (Hunchback) to whom his cousin, the Queen of Beauty, was to have been married.  Next day he was carried off by the same means to Damascus, where he lived for ten years as a pastry-cook.  Search was made for him, and the search party, halting outside the city of Damascus, sent for some cheese-cakes.  When the cheese-cakes arrived, the widow of Nouredeen declared that they must have been made by her son, for no one else knew the secret of making them, and that she herself had taught it to him.  On hearing this, the vizier ordered Bedredeen to be seized, “for making cheese-cakes without pepper,” and the joke was carried on till the party arrived at Cairo, when the pastry-cook prince was reunited to his wife, the Queen of Beauty.—­Arabian Nights ("Nouredeen Ali,” etc.).

BEDWIN (Mrs.), housekeeper to Mr. Brownlow.  A kind, motherly soul, who loves Oliver Twist most dearly.—­C.  Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837).

BEE OF ATTICA, Soph’ocles the dramatist (B.C. 495-405).  The “Athenian Bee” was Plato the philosopher (B.C. 428-347).

  The Bee of Attica rivalled AEschylus when in
  the possession of the stage.—­Sir W. Scott, The
  Drama.

BEEF’INGTON (Milor), introduced in The Rovers. Casimir is a Polish emigrant, and Beefington an English nobleman exiled by the tyranny of king John.—­Anti-Jacobin.

  “Will without power,” said the sagacious Casimir,
  to Milor Beefington, “is like children playing
  at soldiers.”—­Macaulay.

BE’ELZELBUB (4 syl.), called “prince of the devils” (Matt. xii. 24), worshipped at Ekron, a city of the Philistines (2 Kings i. 2), and made by Milton second to Satan.

  One next himself in power and next in crime—­Beelzebub.

  Paradise Lost, i. 80 (1665).

BEE’NIE (2 syl.), chambermaid at Old St. Ronan’s inn, held by Meg Dods.—­Sir W. Scott, St. Ronan’s Well (time, George III.).

BEES (Telling the), a superstition still prevalent in some rural districts that the bees must be told at once if a death occur in the family, or every swarm will take flight.  In Whittier’s poem, Telling the Bees, the lover coming to visit his mistress sees the small servant draping the hives with black, and hears her chant: 

  “Stay at home, pretty bees, fly not hence,
  Mistress Mary is dead and gone.”

BEFA’NA, the good fairy of Italian children.  She is supposed to fill their shoes and socks with toys when they go to bed on Twelfth Night.  Some one enters the bedroom for the purpose, and the wakeful youngters cry out, “Ecco la Befana!” According to legend, Befana was too busy with house affairs to take heed of the Magi when they went to offer their gifts, and said she would stop for their return; but they returned by another way, and Befana every Twelfth Night watches to see them.  The name is a corruption of Epiphania.