The Village Watch-Tower | Page 5

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, 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 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