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 alderbushes
where he had made his morning toilet.
An early ablution of his 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.