Anne of Windy Poplars - L. M. Montgomery [7]
They keep a cow, which is pastured at Mr James Hamilton’s up the road, and Rebecca Dew goes there to milk her. There is any amount of cream, and every morning and evening I understand Rebecca Dew passes a glass of new milk through the opening in the wall gate to Mrs Campbell’s ‘Woman’. It is for ‘little Elizabeth’, who must have it under the doctor’s orders. Who the Woman is or who little Elizabeth is I have yet to discover. Mrs Campbell is the inhabitant and owner of the fortress next door, which is called the Evergreens.
I don’t expect to sleep tonight. I never do sleep my first night in a strange bed, and this is the very strangest bed I’ve ever seen. But I won’t mind. I’ve always loved the night, and I’ll like lying awake and thinking over everything in life, past, present, and to come. Especially, to come.
This is a merciless letter, Gilbert. I won’t inflict such a long one on you again. But I wanted to tell you everything, so that you could picture my new surroundings for yourself. It has come to an end now, for far up the harbour the moon is ‘sinking into shadow-land’. I must write a letter to Marilla yet. It will reach Green Gables the day after tomorrow, and Davy will bring it home from the post-office, and he and Dora will crowd round Marilla while she opens it, and Mrs Lynde will have both ears open… Ow – w – w! That has made me homesick. Good night, dearest, from one who is now and ever will be,
Fondestly yours,
ANNE SHIRLEY
2
Extracts from various letters from the same to the same.
Sept. 26
Do you know where I go to read your letters? Across the road into the grove. There is a little dell there where the sun dapples the ferns. A brook meanders through it; there is a twisted, mossy tree-trunk on which I sit, and the most delightful row of young sister birches. After this, when I have a dream of a certain kind – a golden-green, crimson-veined dream, a very dream of dreams – I shall please my fancy with the belief that it came from my secret dell of birches, and was born of some mystic union between the slenderest, airiest of the sisters and the crooning brook. I love to sit there and listen to the silence of the grove. Have you ever noticed how many different silences there are, Gilbert? The silence of the woods, of the shore, of the meadows, of the night, of the summer afternoon. All different, because all the undertones that thread them are different. I’m sure if I were totally blind and insensitive to heat and cold I could easily tell just where I was by the quality of the silence about me.
School has been ‘keeping’ for two weeks now, and I’ve got things pretty well organized. But Mrs Braddock was right: the Pringles are my problem. And as yet I don’t see exactly how I’m going to solve it in spite of my lucky clovers. As Mrs Braddock says, they are as smooth as cream – and as slippery.
The Pringles are a kind of clan who keep tabs on each other and fight a good bit among themselves, but stand shoulder to shoulder in regard to any outsider. I have come to the conclusion that there are just two kinds of people in Summerside – those who are Pringles and those who aren’t.
My room is full of Pringles, and a good many students who bear another name have Pringle blood in them. The ringleader of them seems to be Jen Pringle, a green-eyed bantling who looks as Becky Sharp must have looked at fourteen. I believe she is deliberately organizing a subtle campaign of insubordination and disrespect, with which I am going to find it hard to cope. She has a knack of making irresistibly comic faces, and when I hear a smothered ripple of laughter running over the room behind my back I know perfectly well what has caused it, but so far I haven’t been able to catch her out in it. She has brains, too – the little wretch! – can write compositions that are fourth cousins to literature, and is quite brilliant in mathematics, woe is me! There is a certain sparkle in everything she says or does, and she has a sense of humorous situations which would be a bond of kinship between us if she hadn’t started