The loss of Friarton Mill would have gone far to destroy the picturesque charm of Copley Grange, with all its advantages of wood and water. For, to the deep regret of its youngest sons and daughters, their ancestor under the second George had taken it upon him with no consideration for the tastes and feelings of his great-great-grandchildren to pull down a gem of a rambling, inconvenient, half-ruinous Elizabethan manor-house. And he had replaced it with a distressingly heavy, square pile of masonry, in which he and the architect had actually thought of little save of expressing pompously their ideas of space and comfort. The little which went beyond these prosaic requirements had borne the doubtful fruit of an Italian portico. It had been voted elegant and classical by the contemporaries of the unfortunate squire who was thus severely reflected upon by his heirs. In a few more years it might rise again into value. It might be prized as a proof of past style, of the tendency of the day, serving as a key to the prevalence of fiddle brown in artists’ work, and to the choice of subjects in Richard Wilson’s paintings, or as an indication of something else equally interesting. But in the present day, with which after all this generation has most to do, it was regarded as an incongruous humbug. The living representative of the family at Copley Grange had done what he could to remedy the fatal error of his ancestor. He had succeeded, when he came of age, to the savings of a long minority. He was also the manager in chief of a large endowment which a pious and charitable predecessor had bequeathed to support a Copley Grange row of almshouses. By a most fortuitous circumstance, if not by a clear interposition of Providence, as the young Squire was disposed to think, this endowment had been legally disputed, and had remained in abeyance till the lawyers picked as much flesh as they could off its bones, so that the rearing of the fabric, which was to be emblematic to all time, fell to a nineteenth-century man. He improved the circumstance. Instead of building a set of ordinary red brick cottages with little cottage kailyards, which might have fitly housed and afforded recreation to twenty old Copley Grange labourers and their aged partners, he let in a little light on the crass ignorance of the destroyer of the Elizabethan manor-house, by building in the immediate vicinity of Copley Grange a terrace of dainty little structures, all gables and mullioned windows, and stacks of chimneys—with pleasure-grounds having thickets and lawns to correspond, which took several experienced gardeners, told off for the purpose, to keep them in order. Finally he built a tiny alms-house chapel on the strictest principles of mediæval architecture. The carving within and without, the painted glass, the frescoes, the Latin texts which might have been Greek or Hebrew to the daily worshippers, the peal of bells, supplied a boast to the county guide-book.