“No, there’s a log-house that we can live in. But I’ll tell you one thing—living up there wouldn’t cost us much. I must have seen fifty partridges on my way in, and the man that drove me told me that there are lots of deer, and now and then a bear. Once in a while a moose strays down from the North, and there must be ducks on the river. I know it’s swarming with trout. Of course we’d be taking a chance on the season. It’s generally either a feast or a famine with the bees—a big crop or a failure—but what do you say?”
“Take the chance! Take it!” cried Alice, jumping up in excitement.
“It does seem too good a thing to lose,” said Carl. “But we hardly want to exile ourselves up there in the north woods for years, do we?”
“Why not? I think it would be glorious!” said his sister. “But we don’t have to. The bees need to be looked after for only four or five months of the year. They’ve been up there for over a year, with hardly any attention at all, and they’ve got on all right. We can leave there in October, sell our honey, and come back here, or go to the city, or do anything—take a trip to Europe, if we’ve had a good season. Carl can go to the university. Don’t you see that it’s the very thing for us? It’s the solution of all our difficulties.”
“The backwoods all summer, and the city in winter! It would give us some variety in life, anyway,” said Carl.
“Yes, and there’s no way of making money so nice as keeping bees. It’s sweet and clean and honest. It’s kid-glove work, too, not muddy and dirty, like farming. And it’s all scientific and fascinating. Every colony has its own peculiar nature that has to be studied. Some you can pet, and some you have to bully. No one could ever make any success with bees who didn’t feel the fascination and wasn’t full of the love of the thing.”
“Well, you’ve got love of it enough to supply the rest of us, Alice, though I believe we’d all like it,” said Bob. “But we mustn’t forget that we can’t do anything without Mr. Ferguson’s consent. We’re infants in the eyes of the law, and he’s our guardian.”
It was too late to go to see Mr. Ferguson that evening, but they talked over the scheme till nearly midnight. They went into all the details and made calculations of their probable profits, till they had worked themselves up into a high stage of enthusiasm. As Bob said, it hardly seemed possible to lose. With a hundred and eighty colonies of bees in a good honey district, they were sure to make some money; but they began to feel desperately afraid that Mr. Ferguson could not be made to see it in the same light.
The next morning they went to see him in a body, primed with arguments. To their delight, however, they found him by no means obdurate. Their guardian was an elderly, shrewd farmer, who saw clearly that the store could never be made to pay, and he had been pondering for some time upon the best investment for the orphans’ inheritance. He promptly advised them to make the best bargain with the Elliott Brothers that they could, but the idea of the apiary came upon him as a shock.
“Fifteen hundred dollars worth of bees!” he said doubtfully. “A pretty big order, ain’t it?”