It is enough to visit one of those compulsory human beehives and to see how a military discipline carries a brutal hypocrisy into it.

While he stood, the boom of the serpent within the adjacent house, and the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an accompaniment to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its louder beating on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or ten beehives just discernible by the path, and its dripping from the eaves into a row of buckets and pans that had been placed under the walls of the cottage.

In shape like the old-fashioned beehive, each hut can be put up by four or six men in a few hours.

And Mr. Upton roused himself from a reverie into which he had fallen as he sat at his study window and watched his favourite beehives.

Alone and almost unsheltered on a great ocean of snow, each man squats down in his frail beehive of a hut, and spends the long winter nights in watching the magnificent auroras, which seem to fill the blue vault of heaven with blood and dye the earth in crimson, listening to the pulsating of the blood in his ears and the faint distant howls of his enemies the wolves.

In the centre of a large cave stood an enormous mass of clear ice, smooth and polished as a mirror, and in the form of a gigantic beehive, with its dome-shaped top just touching the long icicles which depended from the jagged surface of the rock.

These children are known in the church as the "Busy Bees," and each of them wore a white satin badge with a golden beehive stamped upon it, and beneath the beehive the words "Mother's Room," in gilt letters.

The hooded beehive, small and low, Stands like a maiden in the snow; And the old door-slab is half hid Under an alabaster lid. All day it snows: the sheeted post Gleams in the dimness like a ghost; All day the blasted oak has stood A muffled wizard of the wood; Garland and airy cap adorn The sumach and the way-side thorn, And clustering spangles lodge and shine In the dark tresses of the pine.