The Village Watch-Tower(村中了望塔)

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The Village Watch-Tower

Kate Douglas Wiggin

The Village Watch-Tower

INTRODUCTION TO THE

PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION

These days the name of Kate Douglas Wiggin is virtually unknown.

But if one mentions the title "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm," recognition

(at least in America) is instant. Everyone has heard of Rebecca; her story

has been in print continuously since it was first published in 1903. It is

certainly Mrs. Wiggin's most famous book, and the only one of her many

books that is still in print. Everything else she wrote has slipped into

complete obscurity. Occasionally in an antique shop, one may still find a

copy of her immensely popular seasonal book, "The Birds' Christmas

Carol", but that is about the extent of what is readily available, even

second-hand.

The Birds' Christas Carol is available as our Etext #721, Nov. 1996.

In 1904, Jack London wrote (from Manchuria!) to say that Rebecca

had won his heart. ("She is real," he wrote, "she lives; she has given me

many regrets, but I love her.") Some eighty years later I happened to pick

up and read "Rebecca" for the first time. The book was so thoroughly

enjoyable that when I had finished it, I began at once a search for other

works by the same author-- especially for a sequel to "Rebecca", which

seemed practically to demand one. There was never a sequel written, but

"The New Chronicles of Rebecca" was published in 1907, and contained

some further chapters in the life of its heroine. I had to be satisfied with

that, for the time being. Then, well over a year after jotting down Mrs.

Wiggin's name on my list of authors to "purchase on sight", I finally ran

across a copy of "The Village Watch-Tower"; and it was not even a book

of which I had heard. It was first published in 1895 by Houghton, who

published much of her other work at the time, and apparently was never

published again. Shortly thereafter I found a copy of her autobiography.

Kate Douglas Wiggin (nee Smith) was born in Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania, on September 28, 1856. She was raised for the most-part in

Maine, which forms a backdrop to much of her fiction. She moved to

The Village Watch-Tower

California in the 1870s, and became involved in the "free kindergarten"

movement. She opened the Silver Street Free Kindergarten in San

Francisco, the first free kindergarten in California, and there she worked

until the late 1880s (meantime opening her own training school for

teachers). Her first husband, Samuel Wiggin, died in 1889. By then

famous, she returned to New York and Maine. She moved in international

social circles, lecturing and giving readings from her work. In 1895 she

married for the second time (to George Riggs).

At her home in San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate and Marin

County, she wrote her first book, "The Birds' Christmas Carol", to raise

money for her school. The book also proved to be her means of entrance

into publishing, translation, and travel in elite circles throughout Europe.

The book was republished many times thereafter, and translated into

several languages. In addition to factual and educational works

(undertaken together with her sister, Nora Archibald Smith) she also wrote

a number of other popular novels in the early years of the 20th century,

including "Rebecca", and "The Story of Waitstill Baxter" (1913). She died

in 1923, on August 23, at Harrow-on-Hill, England.

Beverly Seaton observed, in "American Women Writers", that Mrs.

Wiggin was "a popular writer who expressed what her contemporaries

themselves thought of as 'real life'" (p. 413). "The Village Watch-Tower" I

think is a perfect example of that observation; it captures vividly a few

frozen moments of rural America, right at the twilight of the 19th century.

Most of it was written in the village of Quillcote, Maine, her childhood

home--and certainly the model for the village of these stories.

No attempt has been made to edit this book for consistency or to

update or "correct" the spelling. Mrs. Wiggin's spelling is somewhat

transitional between modern American and British spellings. The only

liberty taken is that of removing extra spaces in contractions. E.g., I have

used "wouldn't" where the original has consistently "would n't"; this is true

for all such contractions with "n't" which appeared inordinately distracting

to the modern reader.

R. McGowan, San Jose, March 1997

The Village Watch-Tower

Dedication

Dear old apple-tree, under whose gnarled branches these stories were

written, to you I dedicate the book. My head was so close to you, who can

tell from whence the thoughts came? I only know that when all the other

trees in the orchard were barren, there were always stories to be found

under your branches, and so it is our joint book, dear apple-tree. Your pink

blossoms have fallen on the page as I wrote; your ruddy fruit has dropped

into my lap; the sunshine streamed through your leaves and tipped my

pencil with gold. The birds singing in your boughs may have lent a sweet

note here and there; and do you remember the day when the gentle shower

came? We just curled the closer, and you and I and the sky all cried

together while we wrote "The Fore-Room Rug."

It should be a lovely book, dear apple-tree, but alas! it is not altogether

that, because I am not so simple as you, and because I have strayed farther

away from the heart of Mother Nature.

KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

"Quillcote," Hollis, Maine, August 12, 1895.

The Village Watch-Tower

THE VILLAGE WATCH-TOWER.

It stood on the gentle slope of a hill, the old gray house, with its

weather-beaten clapboards and its roof of ragged shingles. It was in the

very lap of the road, so that the stage-driver could almost knock on the

window pane without getting down from his seat, on those rare occasions

when he brought "old Mis' Bascom" a parcel from Saco.

Humble and dilapidated as it was, it was almost beautiful in the

springtime, when the dandelion-dotted turf grew close to the great stone

steps; or in the summer, when the famous Bascom elm cast its graceful

shadow over the front door. The elm, indeed, was the only object that ever

did cast its shadow there. Lucinda Bascom said her "front door 'n' entry

never hed ben used except for fun'rals, 'n' she was goin' to keep it nice for

that purpose, 'n' not get it all tracked up."

She was sitting now where she had sat for thirty years. Her high-

backed rocker, with its cushion of copperplate patch and 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

The Village Watch-Tower

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 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.

The Village Watch-Tower

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, faster and faster, till they encountered

some new obstacle, when they heaped themselves together again, like

puppets of Fate, and were beaten by the waves into another helpless

surrender.

With the breaking of the jam, one dead monarch of the forest leaped

into the air as if it had been shot from a cannon's mouth, and lodged

between two jutting peaks of rock high on the river bank. Presently

another log was dashed against it, but rolled off and hurried down the

stream; then another, and still another; but no force seemed enough to

drive the giant from its intrenched position.

"Hurry on down to the next jam, Raish, and let it alone," cried the men.

"Mebbe it'll git washed off in the night, and anyhow you can't budge it

with no kind of a tool we've got here."

Then from the shore came a boy's voice calling, "There's a baby up to

your house!" And the men repeated in stentorian tones, "Baby up to your

house, Raish! Leggo the log; you're wanted!"

"Boy or girl?" shouted the young father.

"Girl!" came back the answer above the roar of the river.

Whereupon Raish Dunnell steadied himself with his pick and taking a

hatchet from his belt, cut a rude letter "L" on the side of the stranded log.

"L's for Lucindy," he laughed. "Now you log if you git's fur as Saco,

drop in to my wife's folks and tell 'em the baby's name."

There had not been such a freshet for years before, and there had never

been one since; so, as the quiet seasons went by, "Lucindy's log" was left

in peace, the columbines blooming all about it, the harebells hanging their

heads of delicate blue among the rocks that held it in place, the birds

building their nests in the knot-holes of its withered side.

Seventy years had passed, and on each birthday, from the time when

she was only "Raish Dunnell's little Lou," to the years when she was

Lucinda Bascom, wife and mother, she had wandered down by the river

side, and gazed, a little superstitiously perhaps, on the log that had been

marked with an "L" on the morning she was born. It had stood the wear

The Village Watch-Tower

and tear of the elements bravely, but now it was beginning, like Lucinda,

to show its age. Its back was bent, like hers; its face was seamed and

wrinkled, like her own; and the village lovers who looked at it from the

opposite bank wondered if, after all, it would hold out as long as "old Mis'

Bascom."

She held out bravely, old Mrs. Bascom, though she was "all skin,

bones, and tongue," as the neighbors said; for nobody needed to go into

the Bascoms' to brighten up aunt Lucinda a bit, or take her the news; one

went in to get a bit of brightness, and to hear the news.

"I should get lonesome, I s'pose," she was wont to say, "if it wa'n't for

the way this house is set, and this chair, and this winder, 'n' all. Men folks

used to build some o' the houses up in a lane, or turn 'em back or side to

the road, so the women folks couldn't see anythin' to keep their minds off

their churnin' or dish-washin'; but Aaron Dunnell hed somethin' else to

think about, 'n' that was himself, first, last, and all the time. His store was

down to bottom of the hill, 'n' when he come up to his meals, he used to

set where he could see the door; 'n' if any cust'mer come, he could call to

'em to wait a spell till he got through eatin'. Land! I can hear him now,

yellin' to 'em, with his mouth full of victuals! They hed to wait till he got

good 'n' ready, too. There wa'n't so much comp'tition in business then as

there is now, or he'd 'a' hed to give up eatin' or hire a clerk. . . . I've always

felt to be thankful that the house was on this rise o' ground. The teams hev

to slow up on 'count o' the hill, 'n' it gives me consid'ble chance to see

folks 'n' what they've got in the back of the wagon, 'n' one thing 'n'

other. . . . The neighbors is continually comin' in here to talk about things

that's goin' on in the village. I like to hear 'em, but land! they can't tell me

nothing'! They often say, `For massy sakes, Lucindy Bascom, how d' you

know that?' `Why,' says I to them, `I don't ask no questions, 'n' folks don't

tell me no lies; I just set in my winder, 'n' put two 'n' two together,--that's

all I do.' I ain't never ben in a playhouse, but I don't suppose the play-

actors git down off the platform on t' the main floor to explain to the folks

what they've ben doin', do they? I expect, if folks can't understand their

draymas when the're actin' of 'em out, they have to go ignorant, don't they?

Well, what do I want with explainin', when everythin' is acted out right in

The Village Watch-Tower

the road?"

There was quite a gathering of neighbors at the Bascoms' on this

particular July afternoon. No invitations had been sent out, and none were

needed. A common excitement had made it vital that people should drop in

somewhere, and speculate about certain interesting matters well known to

be going on in the community, but going on in such an underhand and

secretive fashion that it well-nigh destroyed one's faith in human nature.

The sitting-room door was open into the entry, so that whatever breeze

there was might come in, and an unusual glimpse of the new foreroom rug

was afforded the spectators. Everything was as neat as wax, for Diadema

was a housekeeper of the type fast passing away. The great coal stove was

enveloped in its usual summer wrapper of purple calico, which, tied neatly

about its ebony neck and portly waist, gave it the appearance of a buxom

colored lady presiding over the assembly. The kerosene lamps stood in a

row on the high, narrow mantelpiece, each chimney protected from the

flies by a brown paper bag inverted over its head. Two plaster Samuels

praying under the pink mosquito netting adorned the ends of the shelf.

There were screens at all the windows, and Diadema fidgeted nervously

when a visitor came in the mosquito netting door, for fear a fly should

sneak in with her.

On the wall were certificates of membership in the Missionary Society;

a picture of Maidens welcoming Washington in the Streets of Alexandria,

in a frame of cucumber seeds; and an interesting document setting forth

the claims of the Dunnell family as old settlers long before the separation

of Maine from Massachusetts,--the fact bein' established by an obituary

notice reading, "In Saco, December 1791, Dorcas, daughter of Abiathar

Dunnell, two months old of Fits unbaptized."

"He may be goin' to marry Eunice, and he may not," observed Almira

Berry; "though what she wants of Reuben Hobson is more 'n I can make

out. I never see a widower straighten up as he has this last year. I guess

he's been lookin' round pretty lively, but couldn't find anybody that was

fool enough to give him any encouragement."

"Mebbe she wants to get married," said Hannah Sophia, in a tone that

spoke volumes. "When Parson Perkins come to this parish, one of his first

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TheVillageWatch-Tower1TheVillageWatch-TowerKateDouglasWigginTheVillageWatch-Tower2INTRODUCTIONTOTHEPROJECTGUTENBERGEDITIONThesedaysthenameofKateDouglasWigginisvirtuallyunknown.Butifonementionsthetitle"RebeccaofSunnybrookFarm,"recognition(atleastinAmerica)isinstant.EveryonehasheardofRebecca;herstoryh...

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