We had got back to the extracting house, where the great caldron of metheglin was still bubbling over the fire. The old bee-keeper relieved himself of his stiff Sunday coat, donned his white linen overalls, and fell to skimming the pot.
“There is another use,” said he, after a ruminative pause, “to which honey might be put, if only doctors could be induced to seek curative power in ancient homely things, as they do with the latest new poisons from Germany. That is in the treatment of obesity. Fat people, who are ordered to give up sugar, ought to use honey instead. In my time I have persuaded many a one to try it, and the result has always been the same—a steady reduction in weight, and better health all round. Then, again, dyspeptic folk would find most of their troubles vanish if they substituted the already half-digested honey wherever ordinary sugar forms part of their diet. And did you ever try honey to sweeten tea or coffee? Of course, it must be pure, and without any strongly-marked flavour; but no one would ever return to sugar if once good honey had been tried in this way, or in any kind of cookery where sugar is used.”
The bee-master ran his fingers through his hair, of which he had a magnificent iron-grey crop. The fingers were undeniably sticky; but it was an old habit of his, when in thoughtful mood, and the action seemed to remind him of something. His eyes twinkled merrily.
“Now,” said he, “you are a writer for the papers, and you may therefore want to go into the hair-restoring business some day. Well, here is a recipe for you. It is nothing but honey and water, in equal parts, but it is highly recommended by all the ancient writers on beemanship. Have I tried it? Well, no; at least, not intentionally. But in extracting honey it gets into most places, the hair not excepted. At any rate, honey as a hair-restorer was one of the most famous nostrums of the Middle Ages, and may return to popular favour even now. However, here is something there can be no question about.”
He went to a cupboard, and brought out a jar full of a viscid yellow substance.
“This,” he said, “is an embrocation, and it is the finest thing I know for sprains and bruises. It is made of the wax from old combs, dissolved in turpentine, and if we got nothing else from the hives bee-keeping would yet be justified as a humanitarian calling. Its virtues may be in the wax, or they may be due to the turpentine, but probably they lie in another direction altogether. Bees collect a peculiar resinous matter from pine trees and elsewhere, with which they varnish the whole surface of their combs, and this may be the real curative element in the stuff.”
Now, with a glance at the clock, the bee-master went to the open door and hailed his foreman in from his work about the garden. Between them they lifted away the heavy caldron from the fire, and tilted its steaming contents into a barrel close at hand. The whole building filled at once with a sweet penetrating odour, which might well have been the concentrated fragrance of every summer flower on the countryside.
“But of all the good things given us by the wise physician of the hive,” quoth the old bee-keeper, enthusiastically, “there is nothing so good as well-brewed metheglin. This is just as I have made it for forty years, and as my father made it long before that. Between us we have been brewing mead for more than a century. It is almost a lost art now; but here in Sussex there are still a few antiquated folk who make it, and some, even, who remember the old methers—the ancient cups it used to be quaffed from. As an everyday drink for working-men, wholesome, nourishing, cheering, there is nothing like it in or out of the Empire.”
CHAPTER XI
WINTER WORK ON THE BEE-FARM
The light snow covered the path through the bee-farm, and whitened the roof of every hive. In the red winter twilight it looked more like a human city than ever, with its long double rows of miniature houses stretching away into the dusk on either hand, and its broad central thoroughfare, where the larger hives crowded shoulder to shoulder, casting their black shadows over the glimmering snow.