nthemum while I was
in the office; but even Gilray could hardly have expected me to ask
leave of absence merely to run home and water his plant. You must draw
the line somewhere, even in a government office. When I reached home I
was tired, inclined to take things easily, and not at all in a proper
condition for watering flower-pots. Then Arcadians would drop in. I put
it to any sensible man or woman, could I have been expected to give up
my friends for the sake of a chrysanthemum? Again, it was my custom of
an evening, if not disturbed, to retire with my pipe into my cane chair,
and there pass the hours communing with great minds, or, when the mood
was on me, trifling with a novel. Often when I was in the middle of a
chapter Gilray's flower-pot stood up before my eyes crying for water.
He does not believe this, but it is the solemn truth. At those moments
it was touch and go, whether I watered his chrysanthemum or not. Where
I lost myself was in not hurrying to his rooms at once with a tumbler.
I said to myself that I would go when I had finished my pipe, but by that
time the flower-pot had escaped my memory. This may have been weakness;
all I know is that I should have saved myself much annoyance if I had
risen and watered the chrysanthemum there and then. But would it not
have been rather hard on me to have had to forsake my books for the sake
of Gilray's flowers and flower-pots and plants and things? What right
has a man to go and make a garden of his chambers?

[Illustration]

All the three weeks he was away, Gilray kept pestering me with letters
about his chrysanthemum. He seemed to have no faith in me--a detestable
thing in a man who calls himself your friend. I had promised to water
his flower-pot; and between friends a promise is surely sufficient. It
is not so, however, when Gilray is one of them. I soon hated the sight
of my name in his handwriting. It was not as if he had said outright
that he wrote entirely to know whether I was watering his plant.
His references to it were introduced with all the appearance of
afterthoughts. Often they took the form of postscripts: "By the way,
are you watering my chrysanthemum?" or, "The chrysanthemum ought to be
a beauty by this time;" or, "You must be quite an adept now at watering
plants." Gilray declares now that, in answer to one of these ingenious
epistles, I wrote to him saying that "I had just been watering his
chrysanthemum." My belief is that I did no such thin