... ... pro-pensity (a hanging forward), sus-pend, etc.: v. PONDEROUS. . . . Restoration: L. restaura'tio; fr. restau'ro, I restore. Scene: L. scena; fr. Gr. ske'ně, a covered place. Subdue: fr. L. sub and du'co, duc'tum, to lead, to draw; h., ab-duct, ad-duce, aque-duct (ăq'ua, water), con-duce, conduct, con-duit, de-duce, de-duct, ducat (a coin struck by a duke), duct, ductile, duke (a leader), e-ducate (to lead forth or draw out), e-duce, in-duce, in-duct, intro-duce, pro-duce, se-duce, sub-duct, tra-duce (lit., to lead across in the public view; h., to expose to ridicule), etc. . . . Sylvan : fr. L. sil'va, a wood; h., savage, etc. LXV. DESCRIPTION OF A BEE HUNT. 1. THE beautiful forest in which we were encamped abounded in bee trees-that is to say, trees in the decayed trunks of which wild bees had established their hives. It is surprising in what countless swarms the bees have overspread the far West within but a moderate number of years. The Indians consider the bee the harbinger of the white man, as the buffalo is of the red man; and they say that in proportion as the bee advances the Indian and buffalo retire. They are always accustomed to associate the hum of the beehive with the farmhouse and flower-garden, and to consider those industrious little insects as connected with the busy haunts of man, and I am told that the wild bee is seldom to be met with at any great distance from the frontier. They have been the heralds of civilization, steadfastly preceding it as it advanced from the Atlantic borders; and some of the ancient settlers of the West pretend to give the very year when the honey bee first crossed the Mississippi. 2. The Indians, with surprise, found the moldering trees of their forests suddenly teeming with ambrosial sweets, and nothing, I am told, can exceed the greedy relish with which they banquet for the first time upon this unbought luxury of the wilderness. At present the honey bee swarms in myriads in the noble groves and forests that skirt and intersect the prairies and extend along the alluvial bottoms of the rivers. It seems to me that these beautiful regions answer literally to the description of the land of promise—“ a land flowing with milk and honey;" for the rich pasturage of the prairies is calculated to sustain herds of cattle as countless as the sand on the sea-shore, while the flowers with which they are enameled render them a very paradise for the nectar-seeking bee. 3. We had not been long in the camp when a party set out in quest of a bee tree, and, being curious to witness the sport, I gladly accepted an invitation to accompany them. The party was headed by a veteran bee hunter, a tall, lank fellow, with a homespun garb that hung loosely about his limbs, and with a straw hat shaped not unlike a bee-hive. A comrade, equally uncouth in garb and without a hat, straddled along at his heels with a long rifle on his shoulder. To these succeeded half a dozen others, some with axes and some with rifles, for no one stirs from the camp without his firearms, so as to be ready either for wild deer or wild Indians. 4. After proceeding for some distance, we came to an open glade on the skirts of the forest. Here our leader halted, and then advanced quietly to a low bush, on the top of which he placed a piece of honey-comb. This I found was the bait or lure for the wild bees. Several were soon humming about it and diving into the cells. When they had loaded themselves with honey, they rose into the air, and darted off in a straight line almost with the velocity of a bullet. The hunters watched attentively the course they took, and then set off in the same direction, stumbling along over twisted roots and fallen trees, with their eyes turned up to the sky. In this way they traced the honey-laden bees to their hive in the hollow trunk of a blasted oak, where, after buzzing about for a moment, they entered a hole about sixty feet from the ground. 5. Two of the bee hunters now plied their axes vigorously at the foot of the tree to level it with the ground. The mere spectators and amateurs, in the mean time, drew off to a cautious distance, to be out of the way of the falling of the tree and the vengeance of its inmates. The jarring blows of the axe seemed to have no effect in alarming or disturbing this most industrious community. They continued to ply at their usual occupations; some arriving fully freighted into port, others sallying forth on new expeditions like so many merchantmen in a money-making metropolis, little suspecting impending bankruptcy and downfall. Even a loud crack, which announced the disruption of the trunk, failed to divert their attention from the intense pursuit of gain. At length, down came the tree with a tremendous crash, bursting open from end to end and displaying all the hoarded treasures of the commonwealth. 6. One of the hunters immediately ran up with a wisp of lighted hay as a defense against the bees. The latter, however, made no attack and sought no revenge; they seemed stupefied by the catastrophe and unsuspicious of its cause, and remained crawling and buzzing about the ruins without offering us any molestation. Every one of the party now fell to, with spoon and hunting-knife, to scoop out the flakes of honey-comb with which the hollow trunk was stored. Some of them were of old date and of a deep brown color; others were beautifully white and the honey in their cells was almost limpid. Such of the combs as were entire were placed in camp-kettles, to be conveyed to the encampment; those which had been shivered in the fall were devoured upon the spot. Every bee hunter might have been seen with a rich morsel in his hand, dripping about his fingers and disappearing as rapidly as a cream-tart before the holiday appetite of a school-boy. 7. Nor was it the bee hunters alone that profited by the downfall of this industrious community. As if the bees would carry through the similitude of their habits to those of laborious and gain-loving man, I beheld numbers from rival hives. arriving on eager wing to enrich themselves with the ruin of their neighbors. These busied themselves as eagerly and cheerfully as so many wreckers on an Indiaman that has been driven on shore, plunging into the cells of the broken honeycombs, banqueting greedily on the spoil and then winging their way, full-freighted, to their homes. As to the poor proprietors of the ruin, they seemed to have no heart to do anything, not even to taste the nectar that flowed around them; but crawled backward and forward in vacant desolation, as I have seen a poor fellow, with his hands in his pockets, whistling vacantly and despondingly about the ruins of his house which had been burned. 8. It is difficult to describe the bewilderment and confusion of the bees of the bankrupt hive who had been absent at the time of the catastrophe, and who arrived from time to time with full cargoes from abroad. At first they wheeled about in the air, in the place where their fallen tree had once reared its head, astonished at finding it all a vacuum. At length, as if comprehending their disaster, they settled down in clusters on a dry branch of a neighboring tree, from whence they seemed to contemplate the prostrate ruin and to buzz forth doleful lamentations over the downfall of their republic. 9. We now abandoned the place, leaving much honey in the hollow of the tree. "It will all be cleared off by varmints," said one of the rangers. "What vermin?" asked I. "Oh, bears, and skunks, and raccoons, and 'possums," said he. "The bears are the knowingest varmint for finding out a bee tree in the world. They'll gnaw for days together at the trunk till they make a hole big enough to get in their paws, and then they'll haul out honey, bees and all." IRVING. ... ... Accustom : SELECT ETYMOLOGIES.-Abandon: F. abandonner; fr. the old saying d ban donner, to give over to public mercy; fr. ban, a public proclamation; L. L. ban'num; h., bandil (one under ban), banish. acad, and custom; fr. L. consuetu'do, custom; h., costume. sial: fr. Gr. ambrõs'iðs, immortal; fr. a, priv., and brot'os, mortal. Attack: a dialectal variation of attach, to fasten to; h., attack, to fall upon; fr. F. attaquer, attacher. Banquet, orig., a sitting; h., a feast; fr. F. banquette (ban-kět), a little seat or bench. Border: A. S. bord, board, table, edge. . . . Cargo (allied to charge): fr. the Span. cargar, to load, to charge; fr. L. car'rus, a wagon. Catastrophe: Gr. katas'trŎphe, an overturn; fr. kat'a, down, strèph'ein, to turn. . . . Comrade: lit., a chamber-fellow: fr. L. cam'era, a chamber. ... Connect: L. connec'to, connex'um; fr. con and nec'to, nex'um, to tie; h., an-nex, etc. . . . Count: F. compter; L. com'puto, computa'tum, to compute; fr. pu'to, puta'tum, to trim or prune, to clear up, to think; h., ac-count, am-putate (fr. amb, about), com-putation, de-pute (in L., to esteem, to destine), dis-count, dispute, im-pute, pulative (supposed), re-count, re-putation, re-pute, etc. Defense: L. defen'do, defen'sum; fr. de and fen'do, fen'sum, to ward off, to ... ... ... strike; h., de-fendant, fence, fencible, fend, in-de-fensible, of-fend. . . . Devour: L. de'voro; fr. de and vò'ro, vora'tum, to swallow whole; h., carni-vorous (căr'o, car'nis, flesh), omni-vorous (omnis, all), voracious, etc.. Disaster: fr. dis and L. as'trum; Gr. as'tròn, a star; h., asterisk, astral, astronomy. Doleful: fr. L. dol'eo, I grieve; h., con-dole, dole, dolorous, in-dolent. Frontier: fr. L. frons, fron'tis, the forehead; h., af-front, con-front, ef-frontery, front, frontispiece. Harbinger: Ger. herberger, one who provides lodging; fr. her'ber-ge, harbor, shelter; h., harbor. . . . Industry: L. industria.... Invite: L. invi'to, invita'tum. . . . Labor: L lab'or, labo'ris; h., elaborate. . . . Lament: L. lamen'tor. . . . Limpid: L. lim'pidus. . . . Luxury: L. luxu'ria; h., luxurious, luscious. . . Morsel: ... ... fr. L. mor'de-o, mor'sum, to bite; h., mordacious (biting), re-morse (lit., a biting back). . . . Myriad: Gr. mu'rias; fr. mu'riðs, ten thousand... Neighbor: A. S. neâhbŭr; fr. néah, nigh, and gebûr, a dweller, a boor. . . . Number: L. nu'merus; h., e-numerate, in-numerable, numeral, numerous, super-numerary.... Paradise: Gr. paradei'sos; fr. the Sanskrit, paradésa, a foreign land, the best land. . . . Prairie : F. prairie, an extensive meadow; L. pra'tum. .. ... Profit : fr. L. profi'cio, profec'tum, to go forward, to advance; h., to profit; fr. pro and fă'cio, I make: v. FACT.... Proportion: L. propor'tio; fr. pro, before, and portio; fr. pars, par'tis, a part; h., a-partment, de-part, dis-part, im-part, im-partial, parcel, parse (to resolve a sentence into its parts), part, partial, particle (L. partic'ula, dim. of pars), particular, partisan, partitive, partner, portion, re-partee (F. repartir, to reply), etc. Prostrate: L. prostra'tus; fr. pro and ster'no, stra'tum, to spread out; h., con-sternation, stra'tum (a layer, pl. stra'ta), sub-stratum... . Relish: fr. the F. re, again, le'cher, to lick.... Retire: v. ABSTRACT.... Similitude: L. similitu'do; fr. sim'ilis, like; h., as-similate, dis-semble, dissimilar, dis-simulation, re-semble, fac-sim'i-le (fac, make, sim'i-le, like), simulate (to feign), etc. . . . Stupefy: fr. L. stu'peo, I am struck senseless; h., stupendous, stupid.. Tremendous: L. tremen'dus, that is to be trembled at; fr. trem'o, I tremble; h., tremor, tremulous. . . . Vacant : L. vac'ans, p. pr. of vaco, vaca'tum, to be empty; h., e-vacuate, vacate, vacation, vacuity, vacuum, vacuous. ... Uncouth: A. S. uncûdh; fr. un, not, and cûdh, known; h., strange, boorish.... Vengeance: fr. L. vin'dico, vindica'tum to avenge; h., re-venge, vindicate, vindictive. ... A MOUNTAIN STORM. THE sky is changed!—and such a change! O night, Of a dark eye in woman! Far along From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, Back to the joyous Alps, who calls to her aloud! BYRON.. |