Lucy Maud Montgomery - The Complete Novels of Lucy Maud Montgomery - 20 Titles in One Volume - Including Anne of Green Gables Series, Emily Starr Trilogy, The Blue Castle, The Story Girl & Pat of Silver Bush Series

“We had a catastrophe here two nights ago. Dusty Miller stayed out all night, in spite of Rebecca Dew’s stentorian shouts of ‘Puss’ in the back yard. And when he turned up in the morning … oh, such a looking cat! One eye was closed completely and there was a lump as big as an egg on his jaw. His fur was stiff with mud and one paw was bitten through. But what a triumphant, unrepentant look he had in his one good eye! The widows were horrified but Rebecca Dew said exultantly, ‘That Cat has never had a good fight in his life before. And I’ll bet the other cat looks far worse than he does!’

“A fog is creeping up the harbor tonight, blotting out the red road that little Elizabeth wants to explore. Weeds and leaves are burning in all the town gardens and the combination of smoke and fog is making Spook’s Lane an eerie, fascinating, enchanted place. It is growing late and my bed says, ‘I have sleep for you.’ I’ve grown used to climbing a flight of steps into bed … and climbing down them. Oh, Gilbert, I’ve never told any one this, but it’s too funny to keep any longer. The first morning I woke up in Windy Poplars I forgot all about the steps and made a blithe morning-spring out of bed. I came down like a thousand of brick, as Rebecca Dew would say. Luckily I didn’t break any bones, but I was black and blue for a week.

“Little Elizabeth and I are very good friends by now. She comes every evening for her milk because the Woman is laid up with what Rebecca Dew calls ‘brownkites.’ I always find her at the wall gate, waiting for me, her big eyes full of twilight. We talk with the gate, which has never been opened for years, between us. Elizabeth sips the glass of milk as slowly as possible in order to spin our conversation out. Always, when the last drop is drained, comes the tap-tap on the window.

“I have found that one of the things that is going to happen in Tomorrow is that she will get a letter from her father. She had never got one. I wonder what the man can be thinking of.

“‘You know, he couldn’t bear the sight of me, Miss Shirley,’ she told me, ‘but he mightn’t mind writing to me.’

“‘Who told you he couldn’t bear the sight of you?’ I asked indignantly.

“‘The Woman.’ (Always when Elizabeth says ‘the Woman,’ I can see her like a great big forbidding ‘W,’ all angles and corners.) ‘And it must be true or he would come to see me sometimes.’

“She was Beth that night … it is only when she is Beth that she will talk of her father. When she is Betty she makes faces at her grandmother and the Woman behind their backs; but when she turns into Elsie she is sorry for it and thinks she ought to confess, but is scared to. Very rarely she is Elizabeth and then she has the face of one who listens to fairy music and knows what roses and clovers talk about. She’s the quaintest thing, Gilbert … as sensitive as one of the leaves of the windy poplars, and I love her. It infuriates me to know that those two terrible old women make her go to bed in the dark.

“‘The Woman said I was big enough to sleep without a light. But I feel so small, Miss Shirley, because the night is so big and awful. And there is a stuffed crow in my room and I am afraid of it. The Woman told me it would pick my eyes out if I cried. Of course, Miss Shirley, I don’t believe that, but still I’m scared. Things whisper so to each other at night. But in Tomorrow I’ll never be scared of anything … not even of being kidnaped!’

“‘But there is no danger of your being kidnaped, Elizabeth.’

“‘The Woman said there was if I went anywhere alone or talked to strange persons. But you’re not a strange person, are you, Miss Shirley?’

“‘No, darling. We’ve always known each other in Tomorrow,’ I said.”

Table of Contents

“Windy Poplars,

“Spook’s Lane,

“S’side,

“November 10th.

“DEAREST:

“It used to be that the person I hated most in the world was the person who spoiled my pen-nib. But I can’t hate Rebecca Dew in spite of her habit of using my pen to copy recipes when I’m in school. She’s been doing it again and as a result you won’t get a long or a loving letter this time. (Belovedest.)

“The last cricket song has been sung. The evenings are so chilly now that I have a small chubby, oblong wood-stove in my room. Rebecca Dew put it up … I forgive her the pen for it. There’s nothing that woman can’t do; and she always has a fire lighted for me in it when I come home from school. It is the tiniest of stoves … I could pick it up in my hands. It looks just like a pert little black dog on its four bandy iron legs. But when you fill it with hardwood sticks it blooms rosy red and throws a wonderful heat and you can’t think how cozy it is. I’m sitting before it now, with my feet on its tiny hearth, scribbling to you on my knee.

“Every one else in S’side … more or less … is at the Hardy Pringles’ dance. I was not invited. And Rebecca Dew is so cross about it that I’d hate to be Dusty Miller. But when I think of Hardy’s daughter Myra, beautiful and brainless, trying to prove in an examination paper that the angels at the base of an isosceles triangle are equal, I forgive the entire Pringle clan. And last week she included ‘gallows tree’ quite seriously in a list of trees! But, to be just, all the howlers don’t originate with the Pringles. Blake Fenton defined an alligator recently as ‘a large kind of insect.’ Such are the high lights of a teacher’s life!

“It feels like snow tonight. I like an evening when it feels like snow. The wind is blowing ‘in turret and tree’ and making my cozy room seem even cozier. The last golden leaf will be blown from the aspens tonight.

“I think I’ve been invited to supper everywhere by now … I mean to the homes of all my pupils, both in town and country. And oh, Gilbert darling, I am so sick of pumpkin preserves! Never, never let us have pumpkin preserves in our house of dreams.

“Almost everywhere I’ve gone for the last month I’ve had P. P. for supper. The first time I had it I loved it … it was so golden that I felt I was eating preserved sunshine … and I incautiously raved about it. It got bruited about that I was very fond of P. P. and people had it on purpose for me. Last night I was going to Mr. Hamilton’s and Rebecca Dew assured me that I wouldn’t have to eat P. P. there because none of the Hamiltons liked it. But when we sat down to supper, there on the sideboard was the inevitable cut-glass bowl full of P. P.

“‘I hadn’t any punkin preserves of my own,’ said Mrs. Hamilton, ladling me out a generous dishful, ‘but I heard you was terrible partial to it, so when I was to my cousin’s in Lowvale last Sunday I sez to her, “I’m having Miss Shirley to supper this week and she’s terrible partial to punkin preserves. I wish you’d lend me a jar for her.” So she did and here it is and you can take home what’s left.’

“You should have seen Rebecca Dew’s face when I arrived home from the Hamiltons’ bearing a glass jar two-thirds full of P. P.! Nobody likes it here so we buried it darkly at dead of night in the garden.

“‘You won’t put this in a story, will you?’ she asked anxiously. Ever since Rebecca Dew discovered that I do an occasional bit of fiction for the magazines she has lived in the fear … or hope, I don’t know which … that I’ll put everything that happens at Windy Poplars into a story. She wants me to ‘write up the Pringles and blister them.’ But alas, it’s the Pringles that are doing the blistering and between them and my work in school I have scant time for writing fiction.

“There are only withered leaves and frosted stems in the garden now. Rebecca Dew has done the standard roses up in straw and potato bags, and in the twilight they look exactly like a group of humped-back old men leaning on staffs.