“You know what an Apiary is, Isaac, of course?”

I was sitting in the bee-master’s cottage, opposite to him, in an arm-chair, which was the counterpart of his own, both of them having circular backs, diamond-shaped seats, and chintz cushions with frills.  It was the summer following that in which Jem and I had tried to see how badly we could behave; this uncivilized phase had abated:  Jem used to ride about a great deal with my father, and I had become intimate with Isaac Irvine.

“You know what an Apiary is, Isaac?” said I.

“A what, sir?”

“An A-P-I-A-R-Y.”

“To be sure, sir, to be sure,” said Isaac.  “An appyary” (so he was pleased to pronounce it), “I should be familiar with the name, sir, from my bee-book, but I never calls my own stock anything but the beehives. Beehives is a good, straightforward sort of a name, sir, and it serves my turn.”

“Ah, but you see we haven’t come to the B’s yet,” said I, alluding to what I was thinking of.

“Does your father think of keeping ’em, sir?” said Isaac, alluding to what he was thinking of.

“Oh, he means to have them bound, I believe,” was my reply.

The bee-master now betrayed his bewilderment, and we had a hearty laugh when we discovered that he had been talking about bees whilst I had been talking about the weekly numbers of the Penny Cyclopaedia, which had not as yet reached the letter B, but in which I had found an article on Master Isaac’s craft, under the word Apiary, which had greatly interested me, and ought, I thought, to be interesting to the bee-keeper.  Still thinking of this I said,

“Do you ever take your bees away from home, Isaac?”

“They’re on the moors now, sir,” said Isaac.

“Are they?” I exclaimed.  “Then you’re like the Egyptians, and like the French, and the Piedmontese; only you didn’t take them in a barge.”

“Why, no, sir.  The canal don’t go nigh-hand of the moors at all.”

“The Egyptians,” said I, leaning back into the capacious arms of my chair, and epitomizing what I had read, “who live in Lower Egypt put all their beehives into boats and take them on the river to Upper Egypt.  Right up at that end of the Nile the flowers come out earliest, and the bees get all the good out of them there, and then the boats are moved lower down to where the same kind of flowers are only just beginning to blossom, and the bees get all the good out of them there, and so on, and on, and on, till they’ve travelled right through Egypt, with all the hives piled up, and come back in the boats to where they started from.”

“And every hive a mighty different weight to what it was when they did start, I’ll warrant,” said Master Isaac enthusiastically.  “Did you find all that in those penny numbers, Master Jack?”

“Yes, and oh, lots more, Isaac!  About lots of things and lots of countries.”