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. It was in the south chamber upstairs that she had been born.
Her mother had lain there and listened to the swirl of the water, in that year
when the river was higher than the oldest inhabitant had ever seen it,--
the year when the covered bridge at the Mills had been carried away,
and when the one at the Falls was in hourly danger of succumbing to the force
of the freshet.

All the men in both villages were working on the river,
strengthening the dam, bracing the bridge, and breaking the jams of logs;
and with the parting of the boom, the snapping of the bridge timbers,
the crashing of the logs against the rocks, and the shouts of
the river-drivers, the little Lucinda had come into the world.
Some one had gone for the father, and had found him on the river,
where he had been since day-break, drenched with the storm,
blown fro his dangerous footing time after time, but still battling
with the great heaped-up masses of logs, wrenching them from one
another's grasp, and sending them down the swollen stream.

Finally the jam broke; and a cheer of triumph burst
from the excited men, as the logs, freed from their bondage,
swept down the raging flood, on and ever on in joyous liberty,