ll. A little boy sat by
himself a desk or two behind two young girls, and as we entered, and the
studious faces looked up in surprise, we saw only the pure brows and the
great spiritual eyes of the older girl, almost a woman, and we thought of
the lonely roses we had found up on the hillside. Here was another rose
blooming in the wilderness, a face lovely and beautiful as a spring
reflecting the sky in the middle of a wood. How had she come there, that
beautiful child-woman in the solitude? By what caprice of the strange law
of the distribution of fair faces had she come to flower in this
particular waste place of the earth?--for her face had surely come a long
way, been blown blossom-wise on some far wandering wind, from realms of
old beauty and romance, and it had the exiled look of all beautiful
things. Could she be a plain farmer's daughter, indigenous to that
stubborn soil? No, surely she was not that, and yet--how had she come to
be there? But these were questions we could not put to the schoolmarm.
We could only ask our road, and the prosaic possibilities of lunch in the
neighbourhood, and go on our way. Nor could I press that rose among the
pages of my book--but, as I write, I wonder if it is still making sweet
that desolate spot, and still studying irrelevant geography in the
silence of the hills.

However, we did learn something about our young human rose at a farmhouse
a mile or so farther on. While a motherly housewife prepared us some
lunch, all a-bustle with expectancy of an imminent inroad of harvesters
due to thresh the corn, and liable to eat all before them, a sprightly
young daughter, who attended the same school, and whom we had told about
our call at the schoolhouse, entertained us with girlish gossip of the
neighbourhood. So we learned that our fancies had not been so far wrong,
but that our beautiful young face had indeed come from as far as France,
the orphaned child of a French sailor and an English mother, come over
the seas for a home with a farmer uncle near by. Strange are the
destinies of beautiful faces. All the way from France to Pine Creek! Poor
little world-wandered rose!

And while we ate our lunch, the mother had a sad, beautiful story of a
dead son and a mother's tears to tell us, too sacred to tell again. How
many beautiful faces there are hidden about the world, and how many
beautiful sad stories hidden in the broken hearts of mothers!

CHAPTER XXII

CONCERNING THE POPULA