By this time he was past middle-age, “a butterfly broken on the wheel of life,” as he said; it was of course out of the question to expect him to think of earning his own living. He had become a family tradition by that time, too, firmly embedded in the solidly set cement of family habits. The older generation always had taken care of him, the younger saw no way out, and with an unsurprised resignation bent their shoulders to carry on. So, before any other plans could be made, Uncle Giles had to be thought of. Vacations were taken seriatim not to leave Uncle Giles alone. In buying or building a house, care had to be taken to have a room suitable for Uncle Giles when it was your turn to entertain him. If the children had measles, one of the first things to do was to get Uncle Giles into some other home so that he would not be quarantined. That strange law of family life which ordains that the person most difficult to please is always, in the long run, the one to please whom most efforts are made, worked out in its usual complete detail. The dishes Uncle Giles liked were the only ones served (since other men could “eat anything”); the songs Uncle Giles liked were the only ones sung; the houses were adjusted to him; the very color of the rugs and the pictures on the walls were selected to suit Uncle Giles’s fine and exacting taste. Looking back, through the perspective of a generation-and-a-half, I can see the exact point of safely acknowledged middle-age when Uncle Giles’s health began cautiously to improve; but it must have been imperceptible to those around him, so gradual was the change. His kin grew used to each successive stage of his recovery before they realized it was there, and nobody seems to have been surprised to have Uncle Giles pass into a remarkably hale and vigorous old age. “Invalids often are strong in their later years,” he said of himself. “It is God’s compensation for their earlier sufferings.”