Homespun Tales | Page 7

men's haying hats and visored
caps,--and she proved superior to every test, looking as pretty as a pink
in the best ones and simply ravishing in the worst. In fact, she had been
so fashioned and finished by Nature that, had she been set on a
revolving pedestal in a show-window, the bystanders would have
exclaimed, as each new charm came into view: "Look at her waist! See
her shoulders! And her neck and chin! And her hair!" While the
children, gazing with raptured admiration, would have shrieked, in
unison, "I choose her for mine."
All this is as much as to say that Rose of the river was a beauty, yet it
quite fails to explain, nevertheless, the secret of her power. When she
looked her worst the spell was as potent as when she looked her best.
Hidden away somewhere was a vital spark which warmed every one

who came in contact with it. Her lovely little person was a trifle below
medium height, and it might as well be confessed that her soul, on the
morning when Stephen Waterman saw her hanging out the clothes on
the river-bank, was not large enough to be at all out of proportion; but
when eyes and dimples, lips and cheeks, enslave the onlooker, the soul
is seldom subjected to a close or critical scrutiny. Besides, Rose Wiley
was a nice girl, neat as wax, energetic, merry, amiable, economical. She
was a dutiful granddaughter to two of the most irritating old people in
the county; she never patronized her pug-nosed, pasty-faced girl friends;
she made wonderful pies and doughnuts; and besides, small souls, if
they are of the right sort, sometimes have a way of growing, to the
discomfiture of cynics and the gratification of the angels.
So, on one bank of the river grew the brier rose, a fragile thing,
swaying on a slender stalk and looking at its pretty reflection in the
water; and on the other a sturdy pine tree, well rooted against wind and
storm. And the sturdy pine yearned for the wild rose; and the rose, so
far as it knew, yearned for nothing at all, certainly not for rugged pine
trees standing tall and grim in rocky soil. If, in its present stage of
development, it gravitated toward anything in particular, it would have
been a well-dressed white birch growing on an irreproachable lawn.
And the river, now deep, now shallow, now smooth, now tumultuous,
now sparkling in sunshine, now gloomy under clouds, rolled on to the
engulfing sea. It could not stop to concern itself with the petty
comedies and tragedies that were being enacted along its shores, else it
would never have reached its destination. Only last night, under a full
moon, there had been pairs of lovers leaning over the rails of all the
bridges along its course; but that was a common sight, like that of the
ardent couples sitting on its shady banks these summer days, looking
only into each other's eyes, but exclaiming about the beauty of the
water. Lovers would come and go, sometimes reappearing with
successive installments of loves in a way wholly mysterious to the river.
Meantime it had its own work to do and must be about it, for the side
jams were to be broken and the boom "let out" at the Edgewood bridge.

II
"Old Kennebec"
It was just seven o'clock that same morning when Rose Wiley
smoothed the last wrinkle from her dimity counterpane, picked up a
shred of corn-husk from the spotless floor under the bed, slapped a
mosquito on the window-sill, removed all signs of murder with a moist
towel, and before running down to breakfast cast a frowning look at her
pincushion. Almira, otherwise "Mite," Shapley had been in her room
the afternoon before and disturbed with her careless hand the pattern of
Rose's pins. They were kept religiously in the form of a Maltese cross;
and if, while she was extricating one from her clothing, there had been
an alarm of fire, Rose would have stuck the pin in its appointed place in
the design, at the risk of losing her life.
Entering the kitchen with her light step, she brought the morning
sunshine with her. The old people had already engaged in differences
of opinion, but they commonly suspended open warfare in her presence.
There were the usual last things to be done for breakfast, offices that
belonged to her as her grandmother's assistant. She took yesterday's
soda biscuits out of the steamer where they were warming and
softening; brought an apple pie and a plate of seed cakes from the
pantry; settled the coffee with a piece of dried fish skin and an egg shell;
and transferred some fried potatoes from the spider to a covered dish.
"Did