“You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba or some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan’s microscope. He was large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he had done nothing but take his temperature and read the Churchman. Oh, and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar, out-of-door melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it at Wrenfield--his big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking battalions of green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were grown--early melons and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf melons and monsters: every shape, colour and variety. They were petted and nursed like children--a staff of trained attendants waited on them. I’m not sure they didn’t have a doctor to take their temperature--at any rate the place was full of thermometers. And they didn’t sprawl on the ground like ordinary melons; they were trained against the glass like nectarines, and each melon hung in a net which sustained its weight and left it free on all sides to the sun and air... “It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of his existence was not to let himself be ‘worried.’... I remember his advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about Kate’s bad health, and her need of a change. ‘I never let myself worry,’ he said complacently. ‘It’s the worst thing for the liver--and you look to me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and be cheerful. You’ll make yourself happier and others too.’ And all he had to do was to write a cheque, and send the poor girl off for a holiday! “The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us already. The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us and the others. But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or Kate’s--and one could picture him taking extra care of it for the joke of keeping us waiting. I always felt that the sight of our hungry eyes was a tonic to him.