Explore "The Tides of Barnegat" by Francis Hopkinson Smith on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When Martha, with Meg at her heels, passed Ann Gossaway's cottage the next morning on her way to the post-office -- her daily custom -- the dressmaker, who was sitting in the window, one eye on her needle and the other on the street, craned her head clear of the calico curtain framing the sash and beckoned to her.
This perch of Ann Gossaway's was the eyrie from which she swept the village street, bordered with a double row of wide-spreading elms and fringed with sloping grassy banks spaced at short intervals by hitching-posts and horse-blocks. Her own cottage stood somewhat nearer the flagged street path than the others, and as the garden fences were low and her lookout flanked by two windows, one on each end of her corner, she could not only note what went on about the fronts of her neighbors' houses, but much of what took place in their back yards.