lvuntur risu tabulae_--They can laugh, too, at Troy!

CHAPTER XIX.

ROSES AND THREE-PER-CENTS.

Although in her rose-garden--the rose-garden proper--Mrs Bosenna grew
all varieties of "Hybrid Perpetuals" (these ranked first with her, as
best suited to the Cornish soil and climate), with such "Teas" and
"Hybrid Teas" as took her fancy, and while she pruned these plants hard
in spring, to produce exhibition blooms, sentiment or good taste had
forbidden her to disturb the old border favourites that lined the
pathway in front of the house, or covered its walls and even pushed past
the eaves to its chimneys. Some of these had beautified Rilla year by
year for generations: the Provence cabbage-roses, for instance, in the
border, the Crimson Damask and striped Commandant Beaurepaire; the
moss-roses, pink and white, the China rose that bloomed on into January
by the porch. These, with the Marechal Niel by her bedroom window, the
scented white Banksian that smothered the southern wall, and the
climbing Devoniensis that nothing would stop or stay until its flag was
planted on the very roof-ridge, had greeted her, an old man's bride, on
her first home-coming. They had, in the mysterious way of flowers,
soothed some rebellion of young blood and helped to reconcile her to a
lot which, for a shrewd and practical damsel, was, after all, not
unenviable. She had no romance in her, and was quite unaware that the
roses had helped; but she took a sensuous delight in them, and this had
started her upon her hobby. A success or two in local flower-shows had
done the rest.

Now with a rampant climber such as Rosa Devoniensis it is advisable to
cut out each autumn, and clean remove some of the old wood; and this is
no easy job when early neglect has allowed the plant to riot up and over
the root-thatch. Mrs Bosenna had a particular fondness for this rose,
and for the gipsy flush which separates it from other white roses as an
unmistakable brunette. Yet she was sometimes minded to cut it down and
uproot it, for the perverse thing would persist on flowering at its
summit, and William Skin, sent aloft on ladders--whether in autumn or
spring to prune this riot, or in summer to reap blooms by the armful--
invariably did damage to the thatch.

Mrs Bosenna, then, gloved and armed with a pair of secateurs, stood next
morning by the base of the Devoniensis holding debate with herself.

The issue--that she would decide to spare the offe