"'Is there anything you want, Jane? If there is, speak up and make it
known.' And I says: 'The rest of you can take what you want of the
furniture, and if there's anything left, that can be my part. If there
ain't anything left, there'll be no quarrelin'; for there's jest one
thing I want, and that's grandmother's rose.'

"They all laughed, and sister Mary says, 'Ain't that jest like Jane?'
and brother Joe says, says he:

"'You shall have it, Jane, and further than that, I'll see to the
transplantin'.'

"That very evenin' he come over, and I showed him where I wanted the
rose to stand. He dug 'way down into the clay--there's nothin' a rose
likes better, child, than good red clay--and got a wheelbarrer load o'
soil from the woods, and we put that in first and set the roots in it
and packed 'em good and firm, first with woods' soil, then with clay,
waterin' it all the time. When we got through, I says: 'Now, you
pretty thing you, if you could come all the way from Virginia in a old
iron kittle, you surely won't mind bein' moved from father's place to
mine. Now you've got to live and bloom for me same as you did for
mother.'

"You needn't laugh, child. That rose knew jest what I said, and did
jest what I told it to do. It looked like everything favored us, for
it was early in the spring, things was beginnin' to put out leaves,
and the next day was cloudy and cool. Then it began to rain, and
rained for thirty-six hours right along. And when the sun come out,
grandmother's rose come out, too. Not a leaf on it ever withered, and
me and my children and my children's children have gethered flowers
from it all these years. Folks say I'm foolish about it, and I reckon
I am. I've outlived most o' the people I love, but I don't want to
outlive this rose. We've both weathered many a hard winter, and two or
three times it's been winter-killed clean to the ground, and I thought
I'd lost it. Honey, it was like losin' a child. But there's never been
a winter yet hard enough to kill the life in that rose's root, and I
trust there never will be while I live, for spring wouldn't be spring
to me without grandmother's rose."

Tall, straight, and strong it stood, this oft transplanted pilgrim
rose; and whether in bloom or clothed only in its rich green foliage,
you saw at a glance that it was a flower of royal lineage. When spring
covered it with buds and full blown blossoms of pink, the true rose
color, it spoke of queens' gardens