ories of his home and his childhood were something beautiful. Jamie, seated beside the bed with the light from the window falling on his face, spoke slowly with the deliberation that searches for the salient points, with the loving impulse that puts in the small details that round out the full picture. When he had finished with the final description of how he was brought home from the war to the shock of the knowledge that both of them were gone, and there was nothing whatever, he sat very still, looking through the window, and it was the voice of the Bee Master that called him back.
“And from there on?” he suggested.
So Jamie began again and finished the story. He told it truthfully, with no deviation whatever except that he omitted the night of the storm and its subsequent results.
When he had finished, the Bee Master smiled at him, and then he said: “And what about the bees and the weeks that you have been among them in the blue garden?”
Jamie answered: “As far as my mind is concerned, the time I have spent in your home trying to take care of your bees and your flowers and your trees has been the most beautiful time of my whole life. I began with a gnawing fire in my breast and a bitter blackness in my heart and brain; but some way, owing to some things the little Scout said to me and the clean air and the crisp sunshine and the beauty all around me, there is a sort of corresponding beauty that’s crept into my heart and my brain, and I think it’s smothered a large part of the bitterness. I was so desperately tired when I staggered across the road to
