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.”
Bendameer was some place in China, he thought, or perhaps Japan—but for the matter of that it might not be a real locality, but merely a place invented by the poet. Anyhow, he would in future call the terrace walk Bendameer, for could any one imagine a finer bower of roses than that beneath us? He did not believe that Bendameer could beat it.
If our friend had talked to Sir Foster Fraser—the only person I ever met who had been to Bendameer's stream—he might have expressed his belief much more enthusiastically. On returning from his bicycle tour round the world, and somewhat disillusioned by the East, ready to affirm that fifty years of Europe were better than a cycle in Cathay, he told me that Bendameer's stream was a complete fraud. It was nothing but a muddy puddle oozing its way through an uninteresting district.
In accordance with our rule, neither Dorothy nor I went further than to confess that the lines were very sweet.
“I'll get you a copy with pleasure,” he cried. “I knew you would like them, you are both so literary; and you know how literary I am myself—I cut out all the poems that appear in the Gazette. It's a hobby, and elevating. I suppose you don't think it possible to combine antiquarian tastes and poetical.” Dorothy assured him that she could see a distinct connection between the two; and he went on: “There was another about roses the week before. The editor is clearly a man of taste, and he puts in only things that are appropriate to the season. The other one was about a garden—quite pretty, only perhaps a little vague. I could not quite make out what it meant at places; but I intend to get it off by heart, so I wrote it down in iny pocket-book. Here it is:—
“Rosy is the north,