What actually did happen before another year had passed was the erecting of a tall pillar which looked so lonely in the midst of the grass--a lighthouse marking a shoal in a green sea--that I made four large round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty feet, and set up a nine-foot pillar in the centre of each, planting climbing roses of various sorts around it, hoping that in due time the whole should be incorporated and form a ring of roses about the towering centre column. It really took no more than two years to bring to fruition my most sanguine hopes, and now there are four rose-tents with hundreds of prolific shoots above the apex of each, clinging with eager fingers to the wires which I have brought to them from the top of the central pillar, and threatening in time to form a complete canopy between forty and fifty feet in diameter. In the shade of these ambitious things one sits in what I say is the most peaceful part of the whole place of peace. Even “winter and rough weather” may be regarded with complacency from the well-sheltered seats; and every year toward the end of November Rosamund brings into the house some big sprays of ramblers and asks her mother if there is any boracic lint handy. He jests at scars who never felt an Ards Rover scrape down his arm in resisting lawful arrest. But in July and August, looking down upon the growing canopy from the grass walk above the herbaceous terrace, is like realising Byron's awful longing for all the rosy lips of all the rosy girls in the world to “become one mouth” in order that he might “kiss them all at once from North to South.” There they are, thousands and tens of thousands of rosy mouths; but not for kisses, even separately. Heywood, who, being a painter, is a thoroughly trustworthy consultant on all artistic matters, assures me that Byron was a fool, and that his longing for a unification of a million moments of æsthetic delight was unworthy of his reputation. There may be something in this. I am content to look down upon our eager roses with no more of a longing than that September were as far off as Christmas. It was our antiquarian neighbour who, walking on the terrace one day in mid-July, told us of a beautiful poem which he had just seen in the customary corner of the _Gazette_--the full name of the paper is _The Yardley Gazette, East Longuorth Chronicle, and Nethershire Observer_, but one would no more think of giving it all its titles in ordinary conversation than of giving the Duke of Wellington all his. It is with us as much the _Gazette_ as if no other Gazette had ever been published. But it prints a copy of verses, ancient or modern, every week, and our friend had got hold of a gem. The roses reminded him of it He could only recollect the first two lines, but they were striking:-- “There's a bower of rose by Bendameer's stream And the nightingale sings in it all the night long.”