The small person chuckled appreciatively.
“Neither had I—until I got it. After I had stuck around from the first time I ever saw his white head and away back into his eyes until he said I might be his partner and help him with the bees, I hadn’t had any experience, so I went back one morning, down along the east side over there, to see whether I was bee immune, and we always thought afterward that I made a mistake. My scent wasn’t right.”
Jamie bit his lip and swallowed hard because, as a matter of fact, the young person before him smelled more strongly of horse than of anything else, while dog ran a close second, and mingled with the odours of horse and dog there was a strong hint of Madonna lilies and onions. The combination played on Jamie’s delicate sense of smell in a peculiar way. It was not so long since his eyes had been smarting with self-pity, yet at that particular minute he wanted to whoop. And there was no good reason at all why he should not. Without in the least understanding his mental processes, the small person proceeded gravely.
“My scent wasn’t right. You know, a bee has got smell hollows instead of a nose. They are in two little tubes that stick out where a nose would be if it wasn’t on a bee, and each one of the worker bees (which are the ones that do the business around a hive) each one of the worker bees has got five thousand smell hollows. And a worker isn’t a patchen to a male. A male’s got thirty-seven thousand eight hundred smell hollows, so he’ll be sure not
