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Library / Literature & Fiction

The Village Watch-Tower

by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

Pages
about 153
Category
Literature & Fiction
Language
English
Reading time
2.8 h at 250 wpm
Start readingThe whole book, as cards or one word at a time. 1.6 h at 450 wpm in Read mode.

From the opening

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.

The Village Watch-Tower 1 Tom o' the Blueb'ry Plains 31 The Nooning Tree 55 The Fore-Room Rug 95 A Village Stradivarius 123 The Eventful Trip of the Midnight Cry 195

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.

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