its crocheted tidy,
stood always by a southern window that looked out on the river. The
river was a sheet of crystal, as it poured over the dam; a rushing,
roaring torrent of foaming white, as it swept under the bridge and
fought its way between the rocky cliffs beyond, sweeping swirling,
eddying, in its narrow channel, pulsing restlessly into the ragged
fissures of its shores, and leaping with a tempestuous roar into the
Witches' Eel-pot, a deep wooded gorge cleft in the very heart of the
granite bank.

But Lucinda Bascom could see more than the river from her favorite
window. It was a much-traveled road, the road that ran past the house
on its way from Liberty Village to Milliken's Mills. A tottering old
sign-board, on a verdant triangle of turf, directed you over Deacon
Chute's hill to the "Flag Medder Road," and from thence to Liberty
Centre; the little post-office and store, where the stage stopped twice
a day, was quite within eyeshot; so were the public watering-trough,
Brigadier Hill, and, behind the ruins of an old mill, the wooded path
that led to the Witches' Eel-pot, a favorite walk for village lovers.
This was all on her side of the river. As for the bridge which knit
together the two tiny villages, nobody could pass over that without
being seen from the Bascoms'. The rumble of wheels generally brought
a family party to the window,--Jot Bascom's wife (she that was Diadema
Dennett), Jot himself, if he were in the house, little Jot, and grandpa
Bascom, who looked at the passers-by with a vacant smile parting his
thin lips. Old Mrs. Bascom herself did not need the rumble of wheels
to tell her that a vehicle was coming, for she could see it fully ten
minutes before it reached the bridge,--at the very moment it appeared
at the crest of Saco Hill, where strangers pulled up their horses, on
a clear day, and paused to look at Mount Washington, miles away in the
distance. Tory Hill and Saco Hill met at the bridge, and just there,
too, the river road began its shady course along the east side of the
stream: in view of all which "old Mis' Bascom's settin'-room winder"
might well be called the "Village Watch-Tower," when you consider
further that she had moved only from her high-backed rocker to her bed,
and from her bed to her rocker, for more than thirty years,--ever since
that july day when her husband had had a sun-stroke while painting the
meeting-house steeple, and her baby Jonathan had been thereby hastened
in