The village watch-tower

by Kate Douglas Wiggin

Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive collection. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. Whilst the books in this collection have not been hand curated, an aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature. As a result of this book being first published many decades ago, it may have occasional imperfections. These imperfections may include poor picture quality, blurred or missing text. While some of these imperfections may have appeared in the original work, others may have resulted from the scanning process that has been applied. However, our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. While some publishers have applied optical character recognition (OCR), this approach has its own drawbacks, which include formatting errors, misspelt words, or the presence of inappropriate characters. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with an experience that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic book, and that the occasional imperfection that it might contain will not detract from the experience.

Genres: Classics, Fiction

218 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1970

About the author

Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

Kate Douglas Wiggin, nee Smith (1856-1923) was an American children's author and educator. She was born in Philadelphia, and was of Welsh descent. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the "Silver Street Free Kindergarten"). With her sister in the 1880s she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Her best known books are The Story of Pasty (1883), The Birds' Christmas Carol (1886), Polly Oliver's Problem (1893), A Cathedral Courtship (1893), The Village Watchtoer (1896), Marm Lisa (1897) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903).

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not like this one at all. It has not aged well.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pleasantly surprising collection of six short stories set around the folksy inhabitants of a rural community in Maine near the middle of the 19th century.

Surprising in so much as I didn't have any particular expectations when I decided to give The Village Watch-Tower a quick read, yet it put a smile on my face and I'm glad I did.

Kate Douglas Wiggin was primarily a writer of children's stories, not adult stuff. When the first, title story turned out to be about a nosy old biddy (the Village Watch-Tower in question is the window in her lounge) I thought I was in for a fogeyish, sentimental read, but far from it.

Admittedly a bunch of stories featuring an addle-brained village "softy" being carted away to the poorhouse ('Tom o' the Blueb'ry Plains'), or a romance between a blind violin-maker and an old maid with a scarred face ('The Village Stradivarius') are hardly going to free of pathos, but Wiggin didn't over-sweeten the pot.

Instead she used good-natured humour to add some spice to the meagre lots of her characters. 'The Joining Tree', about a forlorn husband who sees his runaway wife with another man at a traveling circus was particularly funny, as colloquially told by his workmates.

That penultimate tale about the blind and scarred old lovers was really very fine, worth reading on its own, especially welcome after the sad, downbeat endings which preceded it.

Impossible not to like.