have seen a dog racing round a field in terror as a result of a sting from an angry bee.  I have seen a turkey racing round a farmyard in terror as a result of the same thing.  All the trouble arose from a human being’s having very properly removed a large quantity of honey from a row of hives.  I do not admit that the bee would have been justified in stinging even the human being—­who, after all, is master on this partially civilised planet.  It had certainly no right to sting the dog or the turkey, which had as little to do with stealing the honey as the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University.  Yet in spite of such things, and of the fact that some breeds of bees are notorious for their crossness, especially when there is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher in the scale than the mosquito.  Not only does it give you honey instead of malaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but it aims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody, except when it is annoyed.  The mosquito does what it does in cold blood.  That is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor.

But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at two in the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow.  It is not so much that you would be frightened:  if the wasp alighted on your cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till it had finished trying to sting—­that is an infallible preventive.  But there is a limit to the amount of your night’s rest that you are willing to sacrifice in this way.  You cannot hold your breath while you are asleep, and yet you dare not cease holding your breath while a wasp is walking over your face.  Besides, it might crawl into your ear, and what would you do then?  Luckily, the question does not often arise in practice owing to the fact that the wasp and the bee are more like human beings than mosquitoes and have more or less the same habits of nocturnal rest.  As we sit in the garden, however, the mind is bound to speculate, and to revolve such questions as whether this hum of insects that delights us is in itself delightful, whether its delightfulness depends on its surroundings, or whether it depends on its associations with past springs.

Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentially beautiful a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea.  Even these have been criticised, especially by persons who suffer from sleeplessness, but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of mankind.  These three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for giving us pleasure—­a capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of instruments.  It may be that on hearing them we become a part of some universal music, and that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes in some way the rhythm of our own breath and blood.  Man is in love with life and these are the millionfold chorus of life—­the magnified echo of his own pleasure in being alive.  At the same time,