The village of Ledgeville lay below, and a few more minutes of precipitous flight brought Lassie in sight of its houses. Still a few more minutes, and she was in the middle of the village--a very small village, consisting of two streets composing the usual American town cross, and half a dozen stores. Every one whom she met knew just who she was (for had she not arrived upon the evening previous?), and they all regarded her with earnest scrutiny. The inhabitants of Ledgeville themselves were never in the habit of coming down from the Long Bridge with tear-stained faces, heaving bosoms and a catch in their breath, but that Lassie did so, caused them no surprise. Was she not of that unaccountable multitude called "city folks?"
Lassie herself neither thought nor cared how she appeared to the ruminative gaze of Ledgeville at first, but as soon as she did notice the attention which she was attracting, she wanted to get away from it as quickly as possible, eyes being quite unbearable in her present distress. She stopped and asked a kindly looking old man where the bridge--the lower bridge--might be, knowing that it would take her to solitude again. The kindly old man pointed to where the bridge could be seen, a block or so beyond, and she thanked him and hurried on. It was a wooden bridge, very long; and the river here glided in wonderful contrast to that other aspect of itself which plunged so furiously from cataract to cataract, a quarter of a mile further down the course. How curious to think that all smooth-flowing rivers have it in them to foam and rage and gnaw and rend away the backbone of the globe itself, if driven in among narrow and hard environment. Is there ever any simile to those conditions in human lives, I wonder! And then to consider on the other hand that there is no volume of watery menace which, if spread between banks of green with space to flow untrammeled, will not become the greatest and most beneficial of all the helpers of need and seed! That is also a simile--one more cheerful and happy than the former, praise be to God.
The river by Ledgeville is one of those flowing smoothly and broadly between banks of green. So smoothly and sweetly does it flow just there that it might well have brought some quieting mood, some gracious, even current of gently rippling peace, into poor Lassie's throbbing heart, had she but been able to receive any comfort at that moment. But meditation was as far from her at this juncture as her mental attitude was from Alva's, and more than that cannot be said for either proposition.