agrance of New England
for-ests, and though never for a moment getting, through my poor pen,
the atmosphere of Maine's rugged cliffs and the tang of her salt sea
air, they might at least believe for an instant that they had found a
modest Mayflower in her pine woods.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN. July, 1920.

CONTENTS

ROSE O' THE RIVER

I. The Pine and the Rose
II. The "Old Kennebec"
III. The Edgewood "Drive"
IV. "Blasphemious Swearin'"
V. The Game of Jackstraws
VI. Hearts and Other Hearts
VII. The Little House
VIII. The Garden of Eden
IX. The Serpent
X. The Turquoise Ring
XI. Rose Sees the World
XII. Gold and Pinchbeck
XIII. A Country Chevalier
XIV. Housebreaking
XV. The Dream Room

THE OLD PEABODY PEW

SUSANNA AND SUE

I. Mother Ann's Children
II. A Son of Adam
III. Divers Doctrines
IV. Louisa's Mind
V. the Little Quail Bird
VI. Susanna Speaks in Meeting
VII. "The Lower Plane"
VIII. Concerning Backsliders
IX. Love Manifold
X. Brother and Sister
XI. "The Open Door"
XII. The Hills of Home

ROSE O' THE RIVER

I. 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