roots to spread, which they will do to a considerable
distance around. Do not torment yourself with
thinning the fruit; nature will arrange all that
for you. When a fruit is set, if you cannot see
it grow from day to day, you may almost make
sure that it will come to nothing; it will turn
yellow, and drop off of itself. Leave the
bell-glass always over the central roots on the top of
your hillock, lifted sufficiently high to admit
free ventilation; it will protect the collar of the
plants from injury, and shelter them from sudden
chills and heavy rains. If you wish for a few
very large melons, set only one plant on a
hillock; if you prefer a good supply of moderate-
sized fruit, set two.

In hot and dry weather you must water, with
a fine-pierced rose, over the leaves and all; use
no admixture of liquid manure, but take care
that the water is at least as warm as the
atmosphere. Do not wait for the leaves to flag before
you water. Long-continued rains and cold
fogs are more difficult to contend with than
drought; the plant becomes surcharged with
water, turns dropsical, and either dies or is
attacked by serious disease. If a spell of wet
summer weather set in, the best that can be
done is to form a sort of tent over each hillock,
with three long rods, or poles, meeting at the
top and covered with mats or old sail-cloth.
The mountain-shape alone of your melon-beds
ensures a dry subsoil in ordinary seasons. At
the close of the season, fruits which have no
longer a chance of coming to maturity may be
pickled small, like gherkins, as a nearer approach
to pickled mangoes; if larger, they may be
boiled or stewed, like cucumbers or vegetable
marrows, to both of which they are preferable,
in the judgment at least of certain palates.

A melon should not be allowed to remain on
the plant till it is dead ripe; it is the better for
a few days' chambering. The time to cut it is
denoted by a rapid, almost sudden change, from
the green hue of growth to the whitish, yellowish,
or mottled tinges of maturity; by the marked
relief and conspicuousness of the network or
embroidery on the rind; by the exhalation of a
sweet savour, instead of being, as before, almost
scentless, and by a yielding to the pressure of the
thumb applied to the spot where the blossom
once grew. The date of eating it has arrived
when you say to yourself, "This melon must be
eaten to-day; that will keep till to-morrow;
the other till the day after." When to eat it,
depends on whether you are English or French.
If the former, at dessert, as a matter of course;
if the latter, in the middle of breakfast, or at
dinner immediately after soup and unsalted
boiled beef, sometimes with the boiled beef, and
always seasoned with pepper and salt.
Notwithstanding which, at the best Parisian restaurants
the English mode of melon with sugar at dessert
is duly understood and appreciated. How to
eat it, is an open question: a silver knife is too
blunt to cut it; use a steel one very rapidly in
distributing the slices, which should be thick.
On your plate, if you cut it up into too many
delicate little bits, and play with it and pingle
it too long, you will lose half the flavour. Try
the effect of an honest bite at your slice, as if
it were bread and butter or a pear. If it is very
good indeed, put the seeds into your pocket,
and do not lay the fault on anybody if they
produce only indifferent fruit.

MAC.

WE were leaning lazily over the railings which
border the cliffs of sunny Broadstairs, admiring the
blooming stocks and wallflowers that shoot from
the dry white rock, when our attention was diverted
to a squat man, who, perched upon a long kind
of orange-box upon wheels, was urging forward
a not unwilling donkey. Lumps of battered tin
were lying in the orange-box near a tub, in
which, according to a friend at our elbow (who
rather prides himself upon knowing everything
and everybody in the fruitful, hedgeless Isle of
Thanet), there was "pot-wash," collected from
the adjoining houses. "That man," said our
friend, "is known twenty miles round. He is
now on his way back to his domain, where he
treasures old tin; where he keeps dogs upon
horseflesh; where he rears pigs in roadside
holes; where he flays horses, and cheapens their
hide, bones, and hair. He is a remarkable
specimen of a money-maker. With the most
unpromising materials, he has turned shillings upon
shillings, day by day, the last forty years. Let
us stroll after him presently, to his patch of
roadside. He is rather fond of seeing visitors."
New ways of money-making are always welcome
to the sight of men. Let us gratify ourselves
with a peep, then, at our friend in the orange-box.

It has been said that the means of earning a
leg of mutton are endless. There are prosaic
means, and there are poetic means. The vast
varieties of means which lie between the cheapening
of rabbit-skins and the measurement of
the stars almost appal the imagination. The
prosy man goes through a regular apprenticeship;
the incentive man creates a means of his
own. We call to mind a strange figure we met
once at some Kentish village inn. The man was
a human lathe, pliable and strong; with a
pliable, easy will also. It was the passion of
his life to live without a master, and be
continually moving. He had invented a means of
earning his cut at a shoulder of mutton
precisely adapted to his whim and passion. He
became a perfect master of the art of sharpening
saws, and travelled from village to village, from
township to township, with the certainty of
employment, in any butcher's shop. The butchers
looked forward to his coming, because, for two
shillings, he would make their saws keen as
razors. There are the wreckers, the carrion-kites
who frequent our Channel coasts, and
draw their legs of mutton off drowned men's
fingers, and out of sea-logged ships. Consider
the originality and faith of the man who first
based his claim to a leg of mutton upon the sale
of those wooden frogs, dear to our childhood,