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 into a world not in the least ready
to receive him.
She could not have lived without that window, she would have told you,
nor without the river, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she
could remember.
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