The Boarded-Up House
By Augusta Huiell Seaman
It is now high time to introduce the Boarded-up House, which has stared us out of countenance since this story began! It had stared the two girls out of countenance ever since they came to live in the little town of Rockridge, one on each side of it. And long before they arrived there, long before they were born, or Rockridge had begun its mushroom growth as a pretty, modern, country town, the Boarded-up House had stared the passers-by out of countenance with almost irritating persistence.
It was set well back from the street, in a big inclosure guarded by a rickety picket fence and a gate that was never shut but hung loosely on one hinge. Unkempt bushes and tall rank grass flourished in this enclosure, and near the porch grew two pine trees like sentinels at the entrance. At the back was a small orchard of ancient cherry trees, and near the rear door, a well-curb, with the excellent sweep half rotted away.
The house was a big, rambling affair of the Colonial type, with three tall pillars supporting the veranda roof and reaching above the second story. On each side of the central part was a generous wing. It stood relatively high on a sloping lawn, and we have said that it “stared” at passers-by—with truth, because very near the roof were two little windows shaped like half-circles. They somehow bore a close resemblance to a pair of eyes that stared and stared and stared with calm, unwinking blankness.
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Augusta Huiell Seaman
Augusta Huiell Seaman (April 3, 1879 – June 5, 1950) was an American author of children’s literature.
Biography.
Augusta Huiell Seaman was born Augusta Curtiss Huiell in New York City on April 3, 1879, the daughter of the bookkeeper John Valentine Huiell and his third wife, Anna Curtiss. She graduated from Normal College (later renamed Hunter College) in New York City in 1900 and taught elementary school. She married Robert Seaman in 1906. Following her marriage, she devoted her time to writing.
Her career writing mysteries for children began with the publication of The Boarded up House, which ran serially in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1914. Her only child, Helen Roberta (Bobbie), was born in 1915. Her husband, Robert, died in 1927. In 1928, she married her second husband, Francis Parkman Freeman, foreman of the Phipps estate in Island Beach, New Jersey (now part of Berkeley Township, the setting for several of her later books).
While living in Island Beach, Augusta held various positions in the local government, including borough clerk, tax collector, and borough registrar. Over her career, Seaman wrote and published over forty books for young people. She died at age seventy-one and is interred at Rosedale Cemetery in Orange, New Jersey.
Augusta Huiell Seaman
