One morning, in the Hundred Acre Wood, a small bear named Winnie-the-Pooh woke up and said to himself, "I wonder if there is any honey left."

He climbed out of bed. He went to his larder. He looked at the shelf where the honey pot sat.

He lifted the pot up. He turned it upside down. He shook it. He looked inside very carefully, in case there was a little bit right at the bottom that he had missed.

There wasn't.

Pooh sat down on his small chair. He sat for a while. He thought about the pot. He thought about how full it had been only yesterday. He thought about how he had eaten all of it without quite meaning to.

"Bother," said Pooh, out loud, to nobody in particular. "It seems I have eaten all the honey. I didn't mean to eat all of it. But I did."

His tummy made a noise. It was the kind of noise tummies make when they are hoping you will do something about it.

"I hear you," said Pooh to his tummy. "I am thinking."

He thought for quite a long time. Then he thought some more. Thinking, he found, was a bit like honey. The more you needed it, the harder it was to find any.

But at last he had an idea. He would go and see Christopher Robin. Christopher Robin always knew what to do.

Pooh set off through the wood. The path was the same path it always was, with the same trees, and the same patch of sun where the trees opened up before the bridge. Pooh knew this path very well. He had walked it many times, on many sorts of mornings, but never before on a morning when he had no honey at all.

Christopher Robin lived in a small house at the edge of the wood, and when Pooh got there, Christopher Robin was sitting on his doorstep with a large book open on his knees. He was not really reading it. He was looking at the sky in the way people do when they are thinking about something else entirely.

When Christopher Robin saw Pooh coming up the path, he shut the book very quickly. "Pooh!" he said. "I was just thinking about you."

"I ran out of honey this morning," said Pooh.

"Then you had better come in," said Christopher Robin. "There is a biscuit tin on the shelf. And I have been wanting someone to talk to all morning. I think that is even better than honey."

Pooh was not entirely sure about that. Honey was, in his experience, a very good thing. Better than most things. But he went inside anyway, because Christopher Robin was his friend, and the biscuit tin was within reach.

They sat at the small wooden table. Christopher Robin talked. Pooh listened, and ate two biscuits, and eventually three. When Pooh left, the sun was higher than it had been before. He felt better than he had felt that morning, though he could not have said exactly why.

Talking to a friend, when your honey has run out, is not a bad thing at all. It is not honey. But it is something.

Pooh said goodbye to Christopher Robin and walked back into the wood. He was still a little hungry, even after the biscuits, because biscuits are not honey, and a bear of his size cannot live on biscuits alone.

He walked with his nose in the air, listening, because where there are bees there is humming, and where there is humming there is usually honey, and where there is honey there is usually something very good indeed.

Near the big oak tree by the stream, he heard it. A low, warm, golden sort of hum.

Pooh stopped. He looked up. He could see the dark shape of the hive, high up in the oak, with bees going in and out of it the way bees do.

"There is a beehive up there," said Pooh. "I shall need a Very Clever Plan."

The plan was not, it must be said, very clever. Pooh climbed the tree. He climbed it slowly at first, and then more slowly, because tree-climbing is harder for a small bear than it looks. The bees noticed him at about the time he was halfway up. They did not seem pleased.

Pooh fell out of the tree rather faster than he had climbed up it.

He lay on the soft moss at the foot of the oak, looking at the sky between the leaves. He had three bee stings on his nose. His paws were sticky. His ears felt warm. And in his right paw, against all expectation, was a small piece of honeycomb. He had somehow held onto it through everything.

He sat up. He looked at the honeycomb. He ate it.

It was, he thought, the best piece of honeycomb he had ever tasted. Not because it was special honeycomb. Because he had worked very hard for it.

Pooh got up from the moss and shook the leaves out of his fur. The sun was lower now, behind the trees. The wood was beginning to make its evening sounds. Pooh started for home.

On the way, where the path bends near the thistle patch, Pooh found Eeyore. Eeyore was standing very still, looking at a thistle in a way that suggested it was not a very good thistle, but it was the only one available.

Pooh sat down next to him. They didn't say anything for a bit.

"I suppose you've had a nice day," said Eeyore at last. "Most people do. I expect it's different for bears."

Pooh thought about this. He thought about the empty pot, and Christopher Robin, and the bees, and the honeycomb in the grass. He thought about all the small things that had happened, when nothing big had happened at all.

"My honey ran out this morning," said Pooh. "But then some other things happened. And now it is evening, and I think, I think it has been a good day. Which is surprising, when you start it with no honey at all."

Eeyore looked at him for a long moment.

"That," he said slowly, "is a very unexpected thing to say." He paused. "I might try that. Starting with nothing and seeing what happens."

"It is worth trying," said Pooh. "At least once."

When Pooh got home that evening, he washed his paws, and he sat in his small chair, and he looked at the empty pot on the shelf.

He did not put it away.

He kept it where it was. Not because it was useful. Because it reminded him that empty things, sometimes, are the beginning of something.