The pinkish speck that Stephen Waterman had spied from his side of the river
was Rose Wiley of the Brier Neighborhood on the Edgewood side. As there was
another of her name on Brigadier Hill, the Edgewood minister called one of
them the climbing Rose and the other the brier Rose, or sometimes Rose of the
river. She was well named, the pinkish speck. She had not only some of the
sweetest attributes of the wild rose, but the parallel might have been
extended as far as the thorns, for she had wounded her scores,--hearts, be it
understood, not hands. The wounding was, on the whole, very innocently done;
and if fault could be imputed anywhere, it might rightly have been laid at the
door of the kind powers who had made her what she was, since the smile that
blesses a single heart is always destined to break many more.

She had not a single silk gown, but she had what is far better, a figure to
show off a cotton one. Not a brooch nor a pair of earrings was numbered among
her possessions, but any ordinary gems would have looked rather dull and
trivial when compelled to undergo comparison with her bright eyes. As to her
hair, the local milliner declared it impossible for Rose Wiley to get an
unbecoming hat; that on one occasion, being in a frolicsome mood, Rose had
tried on all the headgear in the village emporium,--children's gingham
"Shakers," mourning bonnets for aged dames, 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