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