The court before the mill-house had its own tree, a round-headed bushy mulberry tree, while the house itself was covered with several old-fashioned rose bushes, including a monthly rose which did not wait for June, but sent out its china pink buds early in May, and went on obligingly, supplying large instalments of various shades of magenta-coloured, faintly smelling roses, from month to month, till November, if the winter were not a hard one. The other roses, noisette and a crimson—acquiring a duller purple tinge, perhaps the nearest approach to ‘blue roses’ in fading—adhered strictly to June and July for flowering in one blow, but they made up as much as possible for their unbending character in this respect by pouring forth, when they did blossom, a prodigal wealth of roses, which in their turn discharged a perfect avalanche of crumbled petals into the court and on the breast of the brook, that ran, for days at a time, pied like a daisy, impartially divided into the colours of York and Lancaster, as other rivers have run yellow with gold or red with blood. One side of the house would show sumptuous crimson without a green leaf for a whole fortnight, when it was not a rainy summer; and as for the ivory white noisette roses, the half-blown buds and flowers on a branch could be counted by the fifty, and a single cluster would fill one of Fan Constable’s crazy, tottering flower-glasses. At one time the older of these rose trees, with the ‘mulberry-bush,’ as it was called, had served for a flower-garden to the mill-house, as the bough of a tree or a few stones on the stage used to stand for a forest or a rocky pass. Then the dwellers in the mill-house became less primitive in their notions, and not so easily satisfied. The miller’s wife had her border round her court with daffodils and carnations, sweet-williams and sunflowers in their order, until at last the border merged into a walled garden, which, in addition to its apricot-trees and its early peas and potatoes, had its dahlia and salvia beds, and its frames for raising geraniums and verbenas, all of them not so far behind the terraces and green-houses at Copley Grange. But full of living beauty as Friarton Mill and Copley Grange were, their owners did not escape the curse of humanity, and the dead were lying at the same time both in the mill-house and the grange. Old Peter Constable had paid his last debt, and been gathered to his fathers—full of days and of such honours as an honest, active useful life cannot fail to gather; and the Squire’s wife had inherited so little strength that she had died, worn out with sustaining the dignity and refinement of her station and with bearing three children, before she had attained her twenty-fifth year. CHAPTER II. OLIVER CONSTABLE’S RETURN.