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The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion. The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and could only be entered through a door.
The farmer had surrounded his beehives with a strong, high, barbed wire fence, and had thought them quite safe even from the prying curiosity of his bear-cub, but one day he found out differently. On hearing a great humming about the hives, as though the bees were swarming, he went to investigate. There in the midst of the hives was the old honey thief.
For Father Francis could do no more than this; and all his spare time was taken up in digging his cabbage plot and seeing to his beehives; and the only books that Bébée ever beheld were a few tattered lives of saints that lay moth-eaten on a shelf of his cottage.
Then there were tremendous sycamores in which were ants' nests as big as beehives; and banana trees with torn leaves, probably the most exotic touch of all; and beautiful noble mangoes like domes of a green cathedral; and various sorts of canes and shrubs and lilies growing among them.
His meadows were ruined by pigs, the peasants' cattle strayed in the undergrowth in his woods, and every year the old trees were fewer and fewer: beehives and rusty pails lay about in his garden and kitchen-garden. He had neither talents nor abilities, nor even ordinary capacity for living like other people.
Likewise, in these great beehives where in every corridor swarm men of flesh and blood, it is the privilege of the government, whether of the State or of the United States, as the case may be, to see that human life is protected, that human lungs have something to breathe. These, again, are merely illustrations of conditions. We are in a new world, struggling under old laws.
"Here is a penny from me, because you have said a clever thing," said Kropidlo, "but remember that if the rope break, the beehive keeper break his neck. Those drones from Malborg, by whom Dobrzyn is beset, have stings, and it is dangerous to climb to the beehives." "Owa!" exclaimed Zyndram of Maszkow, the sword bearer of Krakow, "one can smoke them out!" "With what?" "With powder."
Since no elections were permitted, all appointments and removals were made from military headquarters, which soon became political beehives, centers of wirepulling and agencies for the distribution of spoils. At the outset civil officers were ordered to retain their offices during good behavior, subject to military control.
She strolled absently along, with the same tiresome question in her mind, through the untidy bushy garden, past Peter's flower bed, gay with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies, until she came to the row of beehives, silent, deserted-looking dwellings now with only one or two languid inhabitants to be seen crawling torpidly about the entrances.
When, at the end of the path, a thin wicker hurdle came into sight, and behind it podgy beehives with tiled roofs; when in the motionless, stagnant air there came a smell of hay and honey, and a soft buzzing of bees was audible, then the little creature would take complete possession of Olga Mihalovna. She used to sit down on a bench near the shanty woven of branches, and fall to thinking.
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