It was Jem who inherited her sweet temper.

Dear old Jem!  He and I were the best of good friends always, and that sweet temper of his had no doubt much to do with it.  He was very much led by me, though I was the younger, and whatever mischief we got into it was always my fault.

It was I who persuaded him to run away from school, under the, as it proved, insufficient disguise of walnut-juice on our faces and hands.  It was I who began to dig the hole which was to take us through from the kitchen-garden to the other side of the world. (Jem helped me to fill it up again, when the gardener made a fuss about our having chosen the asparagus-bed as the point of departure, which we did because the earth was soft there.) In desert islands or castles, balloons or boats, my hand was first and foremost, and mischief or amusement of every kind, by earth, air, or water, was planned for us by me.

Now and then, however, Jem could crow over me.  How he did deride me when I asked our mother the foolish question—­“Have bees whiskers?”

The bee who betrayed me into this folly was a bumble of the utmost beauty.  The bars of his coat “burned” as “brightly” as those of the tiger in Wombwell’s menagerie, and his fur was softer than my mother’s black velvet mantle.  I knew, for I had kissed him lightly as he sat on the window-frame.  I had seen him brushing first one side and then the other side of his head, with an action so exactly that of my father brushing his whiskers on Sunday morning, that I thought the bee might be trimming his; not knowing that he was sweeping the flower-dust off his antennae with his legs, and putting it into his waistcoat pocket to make bee bread of.

It was the liberty I took in kissing him that made him not sit still any more, and hindered me from examining his cheeks for myself.  He began to dance all over the window, humming his own tune, and before he got tired of dancing he found a chink open at the top sash, and sailed away like a spot of plush upon the air.

I had thus no opportunity of becoming intimate with him, but he was the cause of a more lasting friendship—­my friendship with Isaac Irvine, the bee-keeper.  For when I asked that silly question, my mother said, “Not that I ever saw, love;” and my father said, “If he wants to know about bees, he should go to old Isaac.  He’ll tell him plenty of queer stories about them.”

The first time I saw the bee-keeper was in church, on Catechism Sunday, in circumstances which led to my disgracing myself in a manner that must have been very annoying to my mother, who had taken infinite pains in teaching us.