For many years she easily maintained first rank among the Elmbrook sentinels, and might have done so to the end of her life had not one family taken an unfair advantage by calling in the aid of machinery. Silas Long, the postmaster, was a great student of astronomy, and could talk like a book on comets and northern lights, and all other incomprehensible things that sailed the heavens. So no one objected when he bought a telescope--in fact, the minister had advised it; but before long every one knew that while Si studied the celestial bodies at night the female portion of his family kept the instrument turned on objects terrestrial during the day. Old Granny Long, Silas' mother, was the one who put Mrs. Winters in the background. She was a poor, bedridden body, but lay there, day after day, happy as a queen, with her bed pulled up to the window, and the telescope trained on the surrounding country; and there was little went on between Lake Simcoe and the northern boundary of the township that she did not see. She knew the precise hour of a Monday morning at which the family washings were hung out, and which was the cleanest. It was she who made truancy an impossible risk, for no matter in what out-of-the-way place one might go nutting or swimming, Granny Long was sure to see, and report to the schoolmistress. It was from her, also, that her grandson received the heart-breaking intelligence that young Malcolm Cameron had kissed Marjorie Scott, the minister's oldest girl, at the jog in the road, on the way to prayer-meeting one evening, and if it had not been for her vigilance probably no one would have discovered that Sawed-off Wilmott, who managed the cheese factory down on the Lake Simcoe road, allowed his pigs to run in and out of the factory at will. Indeed, as the deposed and indignant Mrs. Winters often declared, a body didn't dast blow their nose inside the township without Granny Long hearing it through that everlasting spyglass.