32
In A Twinkling He Was In The Water 64
"Rose, I'll Take You Safely" 76
Hiding Her Face As He Flung It Down The River-Bank 116
She Had Gone With Maude To Claude's Store 128
"As Long As Stephen Waterman's Alive, Rose Wiley Can Have Him" 158
"Don't Speak, Stephen, Till You Hear What I Have To Say" 174

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THE PINE AND THE ROSE

It was not long after sunrise, and Stephen Waterman, fresh from his dip
in the river, had scrambled up the hillside from the hut in the
alder-bushes where he had made his morning toilet.

An early ablution of this sort was not the custom of the farmers along
the banks of the Saco, but the Waterman house was hardly a stone's throw
from the water, and there was a clear, deep swimming-hole in the Willow
Cove that would have tempted the busiest man, or the least cleanly, in
York County. Then, too, Stephen was a child of the river, born, reared,
schooled on its very brink, never happy unless he were on it, or in it,
or beside it, or at least within sight or sound of it.

The immensity of the sea had always silenced and overawed him, left him
cold in feeling. The river wooed him, caressed him, won his heart. It
was just big enough to love. It was full of charms and changes, of
varying moods and sudden surprises. Its voice stole in upon his ear with
a melody far sweeter and more subtle than the boom of the ocean. Yet it
was not without strength, and when it was swollen with the freshets of
the spring and brimming with the bounty of its sister streams, it could
dash and roar, boom and crash, with the best of them.

Stephen stood on the side porch, drinking in the glory of the sunrise,
with the Saco winding like a silver ribbon through the sweet loveliness
of the summer landscape.

And the river rolled on toward the sea, singing its morning song,
creating and nourishing beauty at every step of its onward path. Cradled
in the heart of a great mountain-range, it pursued its gleaming way,
here lying silent in glassy lakes, there rushing into tinkling little
falls, foaming great falls, and thundering cataracts. Scores of bridges
spanned its width, but no steamers flurried its crystal depths. Here and
there a rough little rowboat, tethered to a willow, rocked to and fro in
some quiet bend of the shore. H