Then the snowdrops flowered and a hive-bee came to
them; next the yellow crocus; bees came to these, too, and so eager were
they that one bee would visit the same flower five or six times before
finally going away. Bees are very eager for water in the early year; you
may see them in crowds on the wet mud in ditches; there was a wild bee
drowning in a basin of water the other day till I took him out.
Before the end of January the woodbine leaf was out, always the first to
come, and never learning that it is too soon; whether the woodbine came
over with 'Richard Conqueror' or the Romans, it still imagines itself ten
degrees further south, so that some time seems necessary to teach a plant
the alphabet. Immediately afterwards down came a north wind and put
nature under its thumb for two months; the drone-fly hid himself, the
bees went home, everything became shrivelled, dry, inhuman. The local
direction of the wind might vary, but it was still the same polar
draught, the blood-sucker; for, like a vampire, it sucks the very blood
and moisture out of delicate human life, just as it dries up the sap in
the branch. While this lasted there were no notes to make, the changes
were slower than the hour hand of a clock; still it was interesting to
see the tree-climber come every morning at eleven o'clock to the
cobble-stone wall and ascend it exactly as he ascends trees, peering into
chinks among the moss and the pennywort. He seemed almost as fond of
these walls as of his tree trunks.
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