[Illustration: FOREWORD]
Years ago, banished into the far Rio Grande region, I became a keeper of
bees. As a child I had loved them, even caressed them, and many a time
have I held them one and a hundred at once in my hands. I knew their
every mind and their wilful ways; I loved their sweet contrarieties,
their happy acceptation of the inevitable, and their joyous facing of
life.
So it came about that, grown older, I returned to my old engagements,
and, far from human habitation, amid the wild, brush-set wilderness
enveloping Lake Espantoso, I built my house and brought my bees. And,
too, there came with me a little Shadow, and at his heels a shepherd-dog.
There, in that land of boundless spaces, we waited and watched and
dreamed.
The years went by silently, uneventfully—day following day noiselessly,
as sounds die in the sea. Spring came with its bounty of flowers; and
fast on the trail of retreating winter they leaped forth in multitudes:
daisy and phlox and poppy and bluebonnet and Indian feather and anemone
all tossed their heads and flung their beautiful wings into the sunlight.
The earth was sweet with the wild, fresh sweetness of flowers. Even the
cacti and the brush blossomed like roses of Cashmere, hiding their thorns
amid a profusion of loveliness.
Then the winter came, brief, primordial in its changes. The brown earth
and the brown-gray sweep of the horizon, stretching inimitably away,
wakened in rueful contrast to the riot of the vernal months.
Season after season went by until, indeed, I seemed but a ghost
fluttering in and out among the whirling days. Overhead a sky of
perennial blue; in my face the winds from every zone, and in my ears
the somnolent sounds of the years gone to dust. I was overwhelmed by
the impalpable significance of the primeval world—and by the mysterious
unfoldings of life.
Hours at a time I sat amid my little brothers, the bees, now and again
catching up the harmonies of their existence and marveling much at the
divine rhythm of their speech. The longer I sat and brooded the more I
grew into their lives, until I seemed to know their every mood and to
sound the mysteries of their being.
They seemed to know me and to love me. Often in their flight, tired and
overladen, they would rest for a moment on my sleeve, and then away. Many
a one did I raise from the earth where he had fallen—all too like our
fellow-mortals—weighted down by burdens too heavy to bear. And how happy
I was to see them, with ever so little help, again take wing and fly
heartened to their homes. I have sometimes thought that, after all, men
are but bees in their ultimate essence.
Thus, with the passing years, I, a keeper of bees, came to be one of
them; and even now, though far distant, I wander in dreams through the
open aisles about which their white houses cluster, and through that
sweet rose-garden.
My cottage was framed in roses. Clambering Maréschal Neills, yellow as
the sun; and Augusta Victorias, white as the snows of dead winters,
leaned upon the walls; and all about varieties innumerable and known only
to my mother, lifted their heads and prayed for the fulfilment of the law.
One rose there was of all roses the most beautiful. She called it the
Queen of the Prairie. Red it was as the blood of the martyrs; and, huge
as a lotus leaf, it blew the most wonderful of flowers. Here was my
special pride. I loved it because of her hands; I loved it because it
aspired toward perfection.
Early in a morning now gone—a gorgeous spring dawning—I rose and went
into the garden, as was my wont. The sun had not yet risen, and there
was in the air a brooding, a sound of far-away symphonies. From rose
to rose I turned, until presently I came to the most marvelous of them
all. Wonderful beyond words, I drew it to me—a Queen of the Prairie. I
breathed its fragrance, thrilled at its beauty, when, with a start, I saw
deep within the folds of its heart a little bee, drowsing in sleep. I
could but gaze and wonder, and while I gazed one leg quivered a moment
and then was still.
It is the story of his life that I would tell.
I plucked the rose and bore it away with me; and even now, as I write,
its crumbled leaves lie over him in a memorial urn; and I shall be happy
if I have truly caught the meaning of his life, which carried with it so
much of the sweetness of endeavor, so much of the joy of living, and so
much of love for the Kingdom of Light.
BEECHHURST, LONG ISLAND,
March, 1917.