"Banner and Oracle," and much admired by many who read them.




CHAPTER III.

ANTECEDENTS.

The Withers Homestead was the oldest mansion in town. It was built on
the east bank of the river, a little above the curve which gave the name
to Oxbow Village. It stood on an elevation, its west gable close to the
river's edge, an old orchard and a small pond at the foot of the slope
behind it, woods at the east, open to the south, with a great row of
Lombardy poplars standing guard in front of the house. The Hon. Selah
Withers, Esq., a descendant of one of the first colonists, built it for
his own residence, in the early part of the last century. Deeply
impressed with his importance in the order of things, he had chosen to
place it a little removed from the cluster of smaller dwellings about the
Oxbow; and with some vague fancy in his mind of the castles that overlook
the Rhine and the Danube, he had selected this eminence on which to place
his substantial gambrel roofed dwelling-house. Long afterwards a
bay-window, almost a little room of itself, had been thrown out of the
second story on the west side, so that it looked directly down on the
river running beneath it. The chamber, thus half suspended in the air,
had been for years the special apartment of Myrtle Hazard; and as the
boys paddling about on the river would often catch glimpses, through the
window, of the little girl dressed in the scarlet jacket she fancied in
those days, one of them, Cyprian Eveleth had given it a name which became
current among the young people, and indeed furnished to Gifted Hopkins