And I have perhaps a hundred in like case, cripples regaining activity, victims rescued on their death-bed.  If there be a placid joy in life superior to mine, as I stroll through my houses of a morning, much experience of the world in many lands and many circumstances has not revealed it to me.  And any of my readers can attain it, for—­in no conventional sense—­I am my own gardener; that is to say, no male being ever touches an orchid of mine.

One could hardly cite a stronger argument to demolish the superstitions that still hang around this culture.  If a busy man, journalist, essayist, novelist, and miscellaneous litterateur, who lives by his pen, can keep many hundreds of orchids in such health that he is proud to show them to experts—­with no help whatsoever beyond, in emergency, that which ladies of his household, or a woman-servant give—­if he can do this, assuredly the pursuit demands little trouble and little expense.  I am not to lay down principles of cultivation here, but this must be said:  orchids are indifferent to detail.  There lies a secret.  Secure the general conditions necessary for their well-doing, and they will gratefully relieve you of further anxiety; neglect those general conditions, and no care will reconcile them.  The gentleman who reduced my Cattleya to such straits gave himself vast pains, it is likely, consulted no end of books, did all they recommend; and now declares that orchids are unaccountable.  It is just the reverse.  No living things follow with such obstinate obedience a few most simple laws; no machine produces its result more certainly, if one comply with the rules of its being.

This is shown emphatically by those cases which we do not clearly understand; I take for example the strangest, as is fitting.  Some irreverent zealots have hailed the Phaloenopsis as Queen of Flowers, dethroning our venerable rose.  I have not to consider the question of allegiance, but decidedly this is, upon the whole, the most interesting of all orchids in the cultivator’s point of view.  For there are some genera and many species that refuse his attentions more or less stubbornly—­in fact, we do not yet know how to woo them.  But the Phaloenopsis is not among them.  It gives no trouble in the great majority of cases.  For myself, I find it grow with the calm complacency of the cabbage.  Yet we are all aware that our success is accidental, in a measure.  The general conditions which it demands are fulfilled, commonly, in any stove where East Indian plants flourish; but from time to time we receive a vigorous hint that particular conditions, not always forthcoming, are exacted by Phaloenopsis.  Many legends on this theme are current; I may cite two, notorious and easily verified.  The authorities at Kew determined to build a special house for the genus, provided with every comfort which experience or scientific knowledge could suggest.  But when it was opened, six or eight years ago, not a Phaloenopsis