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