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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection)' is a captivating series that follows the adventures of Anne Shirley, a imaginative and outspoken orphan who is accidentally sent to live with the elderly siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert at Green Gables on Prince Edward Island. The series explores themes of love, friendship, and personal growth against the backdrop of the idyllic Canadian countryside. Montgomery's writing style is rich in detail and emotion, immersing readers in the world of Anne Shirley and her many escapades. The series is a beloved classic of children's literature, with memorable characters and poignant storylines that continue to resonate with readers of all ages. Lucy Maud Montgomery drew on her own experiences growing up in rural Canada to create the character of Anne Shirley, infusing the novels with a sense of authenticity and nostalgia. As a prolific writer and poet, Montgomery's works often reflected her love of nature and her deep understanding of human emotions. Her creation of Anne Shirley has endured as one of the most iconic and enduring characters in literature, capturing the hearts of readers around the world. I highly recommend 'Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection)' to anyone looking for a timeless and enchanting read. Montgomery's masterful storytelling and vivid prose make this series a must-read for fans of classic literature and coming-of-age tales. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection)
Table of Contents
Introduction
Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection) gathers Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most beloved cycle of novels alongside companion tales, a volume of verse, and selected autobiographical writings and letters, presenting a unified view of an author whose imagination is inseparable from place. Bringing fiction, poetry, and personal documents into one frame allows readers to follow recurring images, tonal modulations, and artistic choices across forms. The scope is literary rather than archival: it invites sustained reading of the Anne books as a continuum and sets them in conversation with related Prince Edward Island narratives and with Montgomery’s own reflective accounts of her craft.
At the heart of this collection stand the eight Anne novels, from Anne of Green Gables through Rilla of Ingleside, which trace the growth of an imaginative orphan into a woman whose life is closely bound to community, learning, and home. These are narratives of becoming, attentive to the comedy of everyday mishaps and the quiet solemnities that shape character. Montgomery’s approach to the bildungsroman emphasizes friendship, mentorship, and the making of place. Her sentences carry a clear, melodious cadence; her chapters often move through episodic scenes that accumulate into a portrait of values—curiosity, resilience, kindness—tested within ordinary life.
In Anne of Green Gables, an unexpected arrival at Green Gables in the village of Avonlea sets in motion one of literature’s most enduring introductions. The premise is simple: a child seeking a home finds one, and in doing so helps others discover their own capacities for care. Montgomery pairs pastoral description—gardens, lanes, shorelines—with quicksilver humor and dialogue, locating thrill and wonder in schoolrooms, kitchens, and fields. The book articulates, without sentimentality, how imagination can reframe hardship and invite belonging. It also establishes stylistic signatures: keen attention to the natural world, lively minor characters, and a rhythm of incident and reflection.
Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island follow Anne into early adulthood as she teaches, studies, and grows into responsibilities freely chosen. Without departing from the charm of village life, these novels broaden the social world, exploring friendship networks, mentorship, and the testing of ideals in new settings. Montgomery’s humor deepens into a gently ironic poise, and her interest in vocation emerges clearly: education is portrayed as both a discipline and a delight. The narrative pace remains episodic yet purposeful, as seasons turn and decisions accumulate, giving readers a sense of continuity between youthful aspiration and an adult ethic of service.
Anne of Windy Poplars adopts an epistolary form, allowing the heroine’s voice to move through letters that register daily textures—the demands of work, the tangles of personality, the solace of landscape. The shift in form reveals Montgomery’s flexibility with point of view and her ear for conversational intimacy. Anne’s House of Dreams then settles into the earliest season of marriage and homemaking, a domestic sphere attentive to both neighborly ties and private hopes. Here the author’s gift for balancing lightness and gravity is particularly evident: hospitality, friendship, and renewal arise alongside sorrow, rendered with restraint, dignity, and an instinct for consolation.
Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and Rilla of Ingleside shift the center of interest toward family life and the next generation, sustaining continuity while acknowledging change. Homes become vantage points from which to observe community rhythms, children’s imaginative play, and, in Rilla of Ingleside, the pressures felt on the home front during global conflict. Montgomery’s narrative tact keeps large events at a human scale, emphasizing responsibility, mutual aid, and steadfastness. The prose remains lucid and affectionate, with moments of comedy offset by scenes of sober resolve. Across these books, the idea of an inherited moral landscape—shaped by kinship, neighbors, and memory—takes root.
Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea collect linked short stories set in the same milieu as the early novels, offering compact studies of character, courtship, misunderstanding, and reconciliation. The short form lets Montgomery refine a favorite effect: the surprise that feels inevitable in retrospect. Her narrators observe with warmth and wryness, and the settings—lanes, parlors, kitchens, churchyards—are rendered with economy. These volumes complement the novels by broadening the community’s compass and by foregrounding figures who, in a longer narrative, might remain at the periphery. They also demonstrate the author’s command of pacing, voice, and the telling, revealing detail.
The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, are not part of the Anne sequence, yet they share terrain and preoccupations: children’s societies, rural seasons, and the enchantment of narrative itself. A gifted young storyteller presides over a circle of friends whose days are punctuated by tales, errands, and ceremonies of their own devising. The books are notable for their self-awareness about storytelling—how stories travel, persuade, console, and bind companions together. They extend Montgomery’s exploration of memory and imagination, showing how a community’s common life is continually narrated, revised, and cherished through the voices of those who inhabit it.
Kilmeny of the Orchard offers a concise pastoral romance that turns on attention, patience, and the meanings of silence. Set amid orchards and fields, it concentrates the author’s lyrical tendencies into a single arc, favoring atmosphere and the suggestive power of place. The premise—an encounter that becomes a courtship shaped by unusual constraints—allows Montgomery to examine how empathy and imagination bridge difference. The novel’s serenity is tempered by questions about idealization, education, and consent, treated with decorum and care. Its economy of scene and emphasis on setting make it a companionable counterpoint to the larger canvases of the series.
The Watchman and Other Poems gathers verse that distills many of Montgomery’s abiding motifs: the sea’s changeable face, the hush of woods and gardens, the solace of twilight, the ache and joy of remembrance. In these poems, imagery that animates the prose—color, weather, path, and shore—becomes the principal subject. The diction is musical without ornament, and the lineation underscores attention to cadence that prose readers will recognize. The volume reveals a temperament attuned to transience and continuity alike, a sensibility for which beauty is ethical as well as aesthetic, and for which nature offers both sanctuary and instruction.
The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career and the collected letters included here present Montgomery’s voice in nonfictional modes, illuminating the circumstances and convictions that undergird the fiction and poetry. The career narrative recounts, in measured prose, the perseverance required of a working writer and the formative power of reading and landscape. The letters, written across years to various correspondents, add nuance to that self-portrait, revealing habits of observation, professional resolve, and the practicalities of publication. Together, these documents situate the imaginative works within a lived texture of duty, aspiration, and craft, fostering a fuller appreciation of artistic intention.
Across genres, Montgomery’s work is unified by a conviction that attention—to place, to other people, to language—can transform ordinary life. Her sentences are clear, patterned, and quietly musical; her humor is affectionate, her pathos restrained. She writes strong, complex girls and women who claim education, friendship, and meaningful work as their due, and she renders community as a web of obligations and gifts. The Prince Edward Island setting functions as both literal landscape and moral imagination. Gathered together, these novels, stories, poems, and personal writings show an artist of rare consistency and range, whose work continues to invite rereading and fellowship.
Author Biography
Lucy Maud Montgomery (often published as L. M. Montgomery) was a Canadian author whose fiction helped shape international perceptions of rural Prince Edward Island and the possibilities of girls’ coming‑of‑age narratives. Writing across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she blended humor, sentiment, and keen social observation, creating characters whose inner lives felt distinct and resilient. Anne of Green Gables became her best‑known work, spawning sequels and adaptations that carried her stories across media and languages. Yet Montgomery’s range extended beyond Anne, encompassing poetry, short fiction, and autobiographical reflection, all attentive to landscape, community, and the moral weight of everyday choices.
Raised on Prince Edward Island, Montgomery absorbed the island’s fields, shorelines, and small communities as enduring imaginative sources. She trained as a teacher at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and later undertook literature courses at Dalhousie University, experiences that sharpened her command of English prose and classroom realism. Before her first novel, she published extensively in newspapers and magazines, practicing narrative economy and dialogue suited to the periodical market. The rhythms of local talk and the expectations of late‑Victorian and Edwardian readers shaped her craft. Teaching posts and journalistic work also introduced settings, temperaments, and ethical dilemmas that recur throughout her fiction.
Her breakthrough came with Anne of Green Gables, the story of an imaginative orphan whose spirited misreadings and aspirations animate a community. The novel achieved immediate popular success and international reach, encouraging sequels that trace Anne’s education and early adulthood: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, and Anne of Windy Poplars (issued under variant titles in some markets). These books refine Montgomery’s blend of comedy, sentiment, and social observation, highlighting mentorship, female friendship, and the rituals of schooling. Critics and readers alike praised the freshness of Anne’s voice and the vivid rendering of place, qualities that continue to attract new audiences.
Montgomery extended the Anne cycle into marriage, motherhood, and intergenerational community life with Anne’s House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside. Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside shift attention toward the next generation, portraying youthful misadventures alongside the profound disruptions of war. Rilla of Ingleside, set during the First World War, is notable for its home‑front perspective within a Canadian village, balancing patriotic fervor with grief and endurance. Through these later novels, Montgomery sustained her interest in domestic ethics and public duty, showing how ordinary lives absorb historical shocks while preserving humor, affection, and a sense of place.
Beyond the Anne series, Montgomery explored storytelling itself in The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, where a gifted narrator’s tales stitch together family lore, local legend, and childish bravado. Kilmeny of the Orchard offers a romance of reticence and revelation, demonstrating her aptitude for lyrical description and emotional restraint. In Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, she collected short fiction set around familiar locales, fine‑tuning character sketches, comic set pieces, and moral turns. These works display her versatility with point of view and tone, as well as her commitment to community narratives grounded in memory, misunderstanding, and reconciliation.
Montgomery also published poetry and life writing that illuminate her methods and values. The Watchman and Other Poems gathers meditative lyrics on nature, time, and faith, revealing the musicality that underpins her prose. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career offers a concise account of her apprenticeship, persistence with editors, and the discipline required to shape a professional literary life. Collected Letters, spanning decades, provide scholars and readers with a record of her publishing milieu, revision habits, and responses to reception. Together these materials complement the fiction, clarifying how observation, routine, and ambition sustained a remarkably productive career.
Active through two world wars and the interwar years, Montgomery later lived on the Canadian mainland while continuing to publish and correspond with readers. She died in the early 1940s, by then a widely read author whose books had entered classrooms and homes across the world. Her Prince Edward Island settings are preserved and celebrated, drawing visitors who recognize the imaginative power of place in her work. Translations, adaptations, and ongoing scholarship keep her writing in circulation. Montgomery’s legacy rests on resilient heroines, comic sympathy for human foibles, and the conviction that ordinary communities can nurture aspiration, dignity, and wonder.
Historical Context
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s career unfolded across late Victorian, Edwardian, and interwar Canada, and the works gathered here register those transitions. From Anne of Green Gables (1908) through Anne of Ingleside (1939), the Anne books trace a world moving from horse-and-buggy rural life toward modern communications and expanding institutions. Companion volumes—short stories, poems, and autobiographical writings—extend that portrait beyond fiction. They reflect the growth of mass print culture, the emergence of women’s professional authorship, and the pressures of World War I. Read together, the collection documents changing social norms in the Maritimes and Ontario while revealing how a regional writer navigated transatlantic literary markets and readerships.
Prince Edward Island, Montgomery’s birthplace (1874) and frequent setting, joined the Canadian Confederation in 1873. Its late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economy centered on mixed farming, fisheries, and seasonal labor, with regular outmigration to New England, the Prairies, and urban centers. Communities were tightly knit, shaped by Protestant denominations, Sabbath observance, and voluntary associations. One-room schools, local school boards, and township politics structured public life. Railways and packet steamers connected the Island to mainland markets; improved ferry links arrived in the early twentieth century. These conditions inform the rhythms, concerns, and speech of Avonlea and its neighboring districts across the novels and stories.
Montgomery entered print during a boom in North American magazines and juvenile fiction. She sold poems and stories to periodicals before Anne of Green Gables appeared with L. C. Page of Boston in 1908, a time when U.S. houses sought “local color” regional narratives. International copyright practices, illustrated magazines, and railway-enabled distribution expanded her audience in Canada, the United States, and Britain. The later Chronicles volumes collect short fiction first published in magazines, revealing how editors, length limits, and market tastes shaped plot and tone. Such channels also fostered classroom readerships as public libraries and school libraries proliferated in the early twentieth century.
Anne of Green Gables emerges from an era negotiating modernity while cherishing agrarian ideals. It depicts an orphan’s placement within a rural household at a time when informal fostering, charity networks, and church oversight commonly addressed child welfare in Canada. The novel’s schoolroom scenes mirror recitations, spelling bees, and inspector visits typical of one-room schools. Its temperance-era joke about “cordial” sits within Prince Edward Island’s long prohibition period (1901–1948). Rail travel, catalog shopping, and newspapers link Avonlea to wider currents, yet Montgomery frames these within a landscape aesthetic that drew on Romantic and Victorian sensibilities still influential in 1908.
Anne of Avonlea (1909) situates a young woman in the respected but modestly paid profession of teaching. Normal schools, academies, and licensing exams structured Maritime teacher preparation, and female teachers commonly boarded with local families—features visible across Montgomery’s school narratives. Local school boards, often led by prominent families, controlled hiring, curricula, and discipline, reflecting the era’s grassroots governance. Educational exhibitions and public examinations were community events. The portrayal of civic improvement schemes and rural beautification echoes contemporaneous reform impulses, including women’s club work and the belief that education, hygiene, and orderly landscapes could elevate social life.
Anne of the Island (1915) reflects expanding access to higher education for women in Atlantic Canada. Maritime universities began admitting women in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1910s women were increasingly visible in coeducational lecture halls, literary societies, and boarding clubs. The novel’s move from rural community to college town mirrors broader youth migration to cities for credentials and professional opportunities. It registers shifting courtship norms, the etiquette of student life, and the growth of alumni networks. The contrast between campus modernity and Island attachment encapsulates a period when mobility promised advancement yet sharpened questions of identity and belonging.
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)—published as Anne of Windy Willows in the UK and Canada—reaches back to the years between university and marriage. Its epistolary form underscores the centrality of letters when rural free delivery was expanding (from 1908 onward in Canada) and telephones remained unevenly available. The novel’s portraits of school board politics, local patronage, and status-conscious families align with small-town power structures documented across early twentieth-century Canada. Although issued during the Great Depression, its setting is earlier; the text nevertheless shows editorial mediation across markets, as title differences and content adjustments reflected publisher sensibilities and national audiences.
Anne’s House of Dreams (1917) relocates Montgomery’s domestic focus to a maritime village, foregrounding neighborliness, medical practice, and the vulnerabilities of childbirth in the early 1900s. Before widespread hospital obstetrics and public-health infrastructure (Canada’s federal Department of Health formed in 1919), maternal and infant mortality rates were higher than later in the century, and midwives and general practitioners managed most births. The novel’s rhythms of tide, fishery, and lighthouse echo Atlantic work cultures. It also reflects contemporary mourning customs and religious consolation, showing how communities metabolized loss within a Christian framework that informed much rural life.
Anne of Ingleside (1939) returns to family life in a prewar setting, written from the vantage of the late 1930s. Its domestic episodes register consumer culture’s growth—mail-order catalogs, ready-made garments, and branded goods—while affirming the persistence of home production and seasonal economies. Child-rearing scenes echo the era’s popular advice literature and early child-study movements, which, by the 1910s–1920s, filtered into middle-class households through magazines and lectures. The book also reflects ongoing mobility via rail visits and holiday circuits, suggesting how improved transportation tightened kinship networks across distances without erasing the authority of local custom.
Rainbow Valley (1919) centers on a minister’s family, illuminating expectations placed on clergy households in early twentieth-century Canada. The Presbyterian Church, strong in the Maritimes and central Ontario, promoted Sabbath schools, missionary societies, and temperance, all visible in community activities around the manse. Children’s relative freedom in the natural playground of “Rainbow Valley” speaks to rural geographies where unsupervised play coexisted with strict public decorum. The novel’s prewar ambiance captures a moment just before global conflict reshaped priorities, and it quietly records the frictions between institutional respectability and the spontaneity of youth within small communities.
Rilla of Ingleside (1921) is a rare contemporary Canadian novel of the First World War home front. It tracks wartime mobilization: recruiting rallies, Red Cross work, patriotic fundraising, and the tyranny of casualty lists announced by newspapers and telegraphs. The Military Service Act (1917) and debates over conscription divided communities nationally; the novel reflects strains on households without detailing policy. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which devastated Canada, enters the narrative and underscores vulnerabilities of a medical system stretched by war. The book’s attention to letter-writing, censorship, and news circulation documents how information moved—and how anxiety accumulated—during total war.
The Story Girl (1911) and The Golden Road (1913) preserve a children’s culture in which oral storytelling, recitations, and seasonal rituals structured leisure. At the same time, they acknowledge new media and technologies that were transforming play and memory. The Kodak Brownie (introduced 1900) made amateur photography accessible, and the books depict youthful experiments in recording and publishing their own “magazine,” echoing school composition exercises and the era’s fascination with print. Their landscapes of orchards and lanes reflect the Island’s agricultural calendar, revealing how harvests, fairs, and weather still organized time despite the creeping regularity of timetables and modern schedules.
Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), a brief pastoral romance, reflects period attitudes toward disability, heredity, and cure. Early twentieth-century North American discourse often framed muteness and other conditions through moralized or quasi-scientific narratives, and fiction commonly imagined recovery within a plot of courtship and rural renewal. Montgomery’s emphasis on music, secluded gardens, and the redemptive possibilities of love corresponds to contemporary tastes for idyllic settings. The novella also showcases the Island’s orchard economy and social codes of respectability, demonstrating how small communities policed reputation while offering characters a stage for restraint, ritualized courtesy, and carefully bounded intimacy.
Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) and Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920) gather short stories set around Montgomery’s best-known village, many first appearing in magazines. Their themes—matchmaking, disputed inheritances, old quarrels, and reconciliations—are embedded in social processes like quilting bees, church suppers, and school exhibitions. They also record population movements: characters leave for Western homesteads or urban jobs and sometimes return with different manners and expectations. The stories note evolving communications—letters, newspapers, and occasional telephones—while reaffirming the power of gossip and local authority. Their publication dates bracket World War I, and the later volume’s tone acknowledges losses and changed horizons.
The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) belongs to a wartime poetic culture that fused religious consolation, patriotic commitment, and elegy. Newspapers and magazines regularly published occasional verse, and book-length collections circulated among readers who sought uplift and memorialization as casualty figures rose. Montgomery’s nature imagery aligns with a long Anglo-American tradition in which landscapes bear moral meaning, but the 1916 date places the poems amid mobilization, fundraising drives, and anxious waiting on the Canadian home front. The volume illustrates how authors working primarily in prose also turned to poetry to address public feeling during national and imperial crisis.
The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career appeared in 1917 as a serialized professional autobiography, detailing Montgomery’s path through teacher training, work in rural schools, a stint in a family-run post office, and the long apprenticeship in magazines before book success. It illuminates the economics of authorship for women—submission cycles, editorial negotiations, and the juggling of household duties with literary labor. Together with Collected Letters (edited and published in multiple volumes beginning in 1985), it documents responses to World War I, the influenza pandemic, market pressures, and contractual disputes, offering scholars a primary record of how public events intersected with private creativity.
Women’s roles evolve conspicuously across this collection. In the decades when these works were written and set, Canadian women gained new civic rights: federal suffrage in 1918, with Prince Edward Island enfranchising women provincially in 1922. The books do not campaign for reform directly; instead, they normalize women seeking education, managing classrooms, editing school periodicals, and directing charitable efforts. Montgomery’s ministers’ wives and clubwomen evoke a voluntary-sector infrastructure that predated welfare states. The texts also record the limits women faced—unequal pay for teachers, expectations of deference to local elites—showing how agency was negotiated within prevailing religious, legal, and reputational frameworks of the time.','Technological change threads quietly through the narratives. Railways, island ferries, and coastal steamers knit remote communities to cities, enabling schooling, courtship visits, and professional opportunities. Expanding postal services, including rural mail delivery from 1908, underwrite epistolary plots and the circulation of magazines that fuel literary ambitions. Telephones, adopted unevenly in rural Canada in the early twentieth century, appear as novelties or status symbols, altering rhythms of news and social oversight. Consumer goods from national catalogs reflect the rise of standardized tastes. These developments do not displace fields, churches, or kitchens; rather, they create a layered modernity in which old and new coexist.',
Synopsis (Selection)
Anne Shirley — Early Novels (Anne of Green Gables; Anne of Avonlea; Anne of the Island)
From orphaned newcomer to aspiring scholar, Anne’s journey spans life at Green Gables, a first post as a village teacher, and the widening horizons of college. Across Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island, mishaps, friendships, and choices test her imagination and sense of belonging. The tone blends humor and pastoral detail with earnest coming-of-age insight.
Anne Shirley — Windy Poplars
Anne of Windy Poplars follows Anne through an interlude of letters written while she serves as a school administrator in a small town. Navigating social rivalries and stubborn clans, she meets new characters whose quiet crises call for tact and sympathy. The epistolary voice showcases her wit and patience, turning local politics into gentle comedy and humane reconciliation.
Anne Shirley — Marriage and Home (Anne’s House of Dreams; Anne of Ingleside)
In Anne’s House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside, marriage and home life come to the fore as Anne and her husband settle first by the sea, then on a bustling family homestead. Domestic joys and trials unfold alongside vivid portraits of neighbors and the pranks and poetry of childhood. The mood is tender and companionable, affirming love, resilience, and imagination within everyday rhythms.
Anne Shirley — Community and Next Generation (Rainbow Valley; Rilla of Ingleside)
Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside shift attention to children growing up under Anne’s roof and in the nearby manse, and to a younger generation coming of age as the wider world intrudes. Episodes of play and mischief give way to new responsibilities and a dawning sense of history. The arc moves from sunlit community comedy toward sober reflection, tracing innocence, duty, and change.
Avonlea Tales (Chronicles of Avonlea; Further Chronicles of Avonlea)
Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea gather linked tales set in Anne’s village, where chance meetings, mistaken impressions, and stubborn pride often bloom into friendship or romance. While Anne appears at the margins, the focus rests on an ensemble of neighbors and their turning points. The stories favor gentle irony and sentiment, celebrating small moral awakenings and the social fabric of a rural place.
The Story Girl Duology (The Story Girl; The Golden Road)
The Story Girl and The Golden Road follow a circle of cousins led by a gifted young storyteller whose tales make ordinary days feel enchanted. Seasonal adventures, family lore, and local legends frame the children’s gradual awareness of time’s passing. Nostalgic yet lively, the pair meditates on imagination as a bridge between community memory and individual growth.
Kilmeny of the Orchard
Kilmeny of the Orchard is a quiet romance between a young teacher and a reclusive, musically gifted woman whose silence shapes their courtship. Set against orchards and seascapes, the story explores idealization, communication, and the desire to bridge difference. Lyrical description and a delicate mood lend the novella a fable-like grace.
The Watchman and Other Poems
The Watchman and Other Poems collects lyrics attuned to nature, faith, memory, and the sea-light of the Maritimes. Clear rhythms and recurring seasonal images create a contemplative cadence that balances yearning with steadiness. The volume highlights Montgomery’s gift for distilling feeling into precise, musical scene.
Autobiography and Letters (The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career; Collected Letters)
The Alpine Path offers a first-person account of becoming a writer, tracing early aspirations, obstacles, and the steady work of craft. The Collected Letters present candid observations on place, reading, and daily labor, revealing the private texture behind the fiction. Together they illuminate recurrent concerns—imagination, perseverance, home—and the disciplined eye that turns ordinary experience into story.
Anne Shirley (Complete 14 Book Collection)
ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
Chapter I. Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Surprised
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
There are plenty of people in Avonlea and out of it, who can attend closely to their neighbor’s business by dint of neglecting their own; but Mrs. Rachel Lynde was one of those capable creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain. She was a notable housewife; her work was always done and well done; she “ran” the Sewing Circle, helped run the Sunday-school, and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary. Yet with all this Mrs. Rachel found abundant time to sit for hours at her kitchen window, knitting “cotton warp” quilts — she had knitted sixteen of them, as Avonlea housekeepers were wont to tell in awed voices — and keeping a sharp eye on the main road that crossed the hollow and wound up the steep red hill beyond. Since Avonlea occupied a little triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence with water on two sides of it, anybody who went out of it or into it had to pass over that hill road and so run the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eye.
She was sitting there one afternoon in early June. The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees. Thomas Lynde — a meek little man whom Avonlea people called “Rachel Lynde’s husband” — was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert ought to have been sowing his on the big red brook field away over by Green Gables. Mrs. Rachel knew that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William J. Blair’s store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon. Peter had asked him, of course, for Matthew Cuthbert had never been known to volunteer information about anything in his whole life.
And yet here was Matthew Cuthbert, at halfpast three on the afternoon of a busy day, placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill; moreover, he wore a white collar and his best suit of clothes, which was plain proof that he was going out of Avonlea; and he had the buggy and the sorrel mare, which betokened that he was going a considerable distance. Now, where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?
Had it been any other man in Avonlea, Mrs. Rachel, deftly putting this and that together, might have given a pretty good guess as to both questions. But Matthew so rarely went from home that it must be something pressing and unusual which was taking him; he was the shyest man alive and hated to have to go among strangers or to any place where he might have to talk. Matthew, dressed up with a white collar and driving in a buggy, was something that didn’t happen often. Mrs. Rachel, ponder as she might, could make nothing of it and her afternoon’s enjoyment was spoiled.
“I’ll just step over to Green Gables after tea and find out from Marilla where he’s gone and why,” the worthy woman finally concluded. “He doesn’t generally go to town this time of year and he NEVER visits; if he’d run out of turnip seed he wouldn’t dress up and take the buggy to go for more; he wasn’t driving fast enough to be going for a doctor. Yet something must have happened since last night to start him off. I’m clean puzzled, that’s what, and I won’t know a minute’s peace of mind or conscience until I know what has taken Matthew Cuthbert out of Avonlea today.”
Accordingly after tea Mrs. Rachel set out; she had not far to go; the big, rambling, orchard-embowered house where the Cuthberts lived was a scant quarter of a mile up the road from Lynde’s Hollow. To be sure, the long lane made it a good deal further. Matthew Cuthbert’s father, as shy and silent as his son after him, had got as far away as he possibly could from his fellow men without actually retreating into the woods when he founded his homestead. Green Gables was built at the furthest edge of his cleared land and there it was to this day, barely visible from the main road along which all the other Avonlea houses were so sociably situated. Mrs. Rachel Lynde did not call living in such a place LIVING at all.
“It’s just STAYING, that’s what,” she said as she stepped along the deep-rutted, grassy lane bordered with wild rose bushes. “It’s no wonder Matthew and Marilla are both a little odd, living away back here by themselves. Trees aren’t much company, though dear knows if they were there’d be enough of them. I’d ruther look at people. To be sure, they seem contented enough; but then, I suppose, they’re used to it. A body can get used to anything, even to being hanged, as the Irishman said.”
With this Mrs. Rachel stepped out of the lane into the backyard of Green Gables. Very green and neat and precise was that yard, set about on one side with great patriarchal willows and the other with prim Lombardies. Not a stray stick nor stone was to be seen, for Mrs. Rachel would have seen it if there had been. Privately she was of the opinion that Marilla Cuthbert swept that yard over as often as she swept her house. One could have eaten a meal off the ground without overbrimming the proverbial peck of dirt.
Mrs. Rachel rapped smartly at the kitchen door and stepped in when bidden to do so. The kitchen at Green Gables was a cheerful apartment — or would have been cheerful if it had not been so painfully clean as to give it something of the appearance of an unused parlor. Its windows looked east and west; through the west one, looking out on the back yard, came a flood of mellow June sunlight; but the east one, whence you got a glimpse of the bloom white cherry-trees in the left orchard and nodding, slender birches down in the hollow by the brook, was greened over by a tangle of vines. Here sat Marilla Cuthbert, when she sat at all, always slightly distrustful of sunshine, which seemed to her too dancing and irresponsible a thing for a world which was meant to be taken seriously; and here she sat now, knitting, and the table behind her was laid for supper.
Mrs. Rachel, before she had fairly closed the door, had taken a mental note of everything that was on that table. There were three plates laid, so that Marilla must be expecting some one home with Matthew to tea; but the dishes were everyday dishes and there was only crab-apple preserves and one kind of cake, so that the expected company could not be any particular company. Yet what of Matthew’s white collar and the sorrel mare? Mrs. Rachel was getting fairly dizzy with this unusual mystery about quiet, unmysterious Green Gables.
“Good evening, Rachel,” Marilla said briskly. “This is a real fine evening, isn’t it? Won’t you sit down? How are all your folks?”
Something that for lack of any other name might be called friendship existed and always had existed between Marilla Cuthbert and Mrs. Rachel, in spite of — or perhaps because of — their dissimilarity.
Marilla was a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves; her dark hair showed some gray streaks and was always twisted up in a hard little knot behind with two wire hairpins stuck aggressively through it. She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humor.
“We’re all pretty well,” said Mrs. Rachel. “I was kind of afraid YOU weren’t, though, when I saw Matthew starting off today. I thought maybe he was going to the doctor’s.”
Marilla’s lips twitched understandingly. She had expected Mrs. Rachel up; she had known that the sight of Matthew jaunting off so unaccountably would be too much for her neighbor’s curiosity.
“Oh, no, I’m quite well although I had a bad headache yesterday,” she said. “Matthew went to Bright River. We’re getting a little boy from an orphan asylum in Nova Scotia and he’s coming on the train tonight.”
If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a kangaroo from Australia Mrs. Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually stricken dumb for five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but Mrs. Rachel was almost forced to suppose it.
“Are you in earnest, Marilla?” she demanded when voice returned to her.
“Yes, of course,” said Marilla, as if getting boys from orphan asylums in Nova Scotia were part of the usual spring work on any well-regulated Avonlea farm instead of being an unheard of innovation.
Mrs. Rachel felt that she had received a severe mental jolt. She thought in exclamation points. A boy! Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of all people adopting a boy! From an orphan asylum! Well, the world was certainly turning upside down! She would be surprised at nothing after this! Nothing!
“What on earth put such a notion into your head?” she demanded disapprovingly.
This had been done without her advice being asked, and must perforce be disapproved.
“Well, we’ve been thinking about it for some time — all winter in fact,” returned Marilla. “Mrs. Alexander Spencer was up here one day before Christmas and she said she was going to get a little girl from the asylum over in Hopeton in the spring. Her cousin lives there and Mrs. Spencer has visited here and knows all about it. So Matthew and I have talked it over off and on ever since. We thought we’d get a boy. Matthew is getting up in years, you know — he’s sixty — and he isn’t so spry as he once was. His heart troubles him a good deal. And you know how desperate hard it’s got to be to get hired help. There’s never anybody to be had but those stupid, half-grown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he’s up and off to the lobster canneries or the States. At first Matthew suggested getting a Home boy. But I said ‘no’ flat to that. ‘They may be all right — I’m not saying they’re not — but no London street Arabs for me,’ I said. ‘Give me a native born at least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a born Canadian.’ So in the end we decided to ask Mrs. Spencer to pick us out one when she went over to get her little girl. We heard last week she was going, so we sent her word by Richard Spencer’s folks at Carmody to bring us a smart, likely boy of about ten or eleven. We decided that would be the best age — old enough to be of some use in doing chores right off and young enough to be trained up proper. We mean to give him a good home and schooling. We had a telegram from Mrs. Alexander Spencer today — the mailman brought it from the station — saying they were coming on the five-thirty train tonight. So Matthew went to Bright River to meet him. Mrs. Spencer will drop him off there. Of course she goes on to White Sands station herself.”
Mrs. Rachel prided herself on always speaking her mind; she proceeded to speak it now, having adjusted her mental attitude to this amazing piece of news.
“Well, Marilla, I’ll just tell you plain that I think you’re doing a mighty foolish thing — a risky thing, that’s what. You don’t know what you’re getting. You’re bringing a strange child into your house and home and you don’t know a single thing about him nor what his disposition is like nor what sort of parents he had nor how he’s likely to turn out. Why, it was only last week I read in the paper how a man and his wife up west of the Island took a boy out of an orphan asylum and he set fire to the house at night — set it ON PURPOSE, Marilla — and nearly burnt them to a crisp in their beds. And I know another case where an adopted boy used to suck the eggs — they couldn’t break him of it. If you had asked my advice in the matter — which you didn’t do, Marilla — I’d have said for mercy’s sake not to think of such a thing, that’s what.”
This Job’s comforting seemed neither to offend nor to alarm Marilla. She knitted steadily on.
“I don’t deny there’s something in what you say, Rachel. I’ve had some qualms myself. But Matthew was terrible set on it. I could see that, so I gave in. It’s so seldom Matthew sets his mind on anything that when he does I always feel it’s my duty to give in. And as for the risk, there’s risks in pretty near everything a body does in this world. There’s risks in people’s having children of their own if it comes to that — they don’t always turn out well. And then Nova Scotia is right close to the Island. It isn’t as if we were getting him from England or the States. He can’t be much different from ourselves.”
“Well, I hope it will turn out all right,” said Mrs. Rachel in a tone that plainly indicated her painful doubts. “Only don’t say I didn’t warn you if he burns Green Gables down or puts strychnine in the well — I heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies. Only, it was a girl in that instance.”
“Well, we’re not getting a girl,” said Marilla, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment and not to be dreaded in the case of a boy. “I’d never dream of taking a girl to bring up. I wonder at Mrs. Alexander Spencer for doing it. But there, SHE wouldn’t shrink from adopting a whole orphan asylum if she took it into her head.”
Mrs. Rachel would have liked to stay until Matthew came home with his imported orphan. But reflecting that it would be a good two hours at least before his arrival she concluded to go up the road to Robert Bell’s and tell the news. It would certainly make a sensation second to none, and Mrs. Rachel dearly loved to make a sensation. So she took herself away, somewhat to Marilla’s relief, for the latter felt her doubts and fears reviving under the influence of Mrs. Rachel’s pessimism.
“Well, of all things that ever were or will be!” ejaculated Mrs. Rachel when she was safely out in the lane. “It does really seem as if I must be dreaming. Well, I’m sorry for that poor young one and no mistake. Matthew and Marilla don’t know anything about children and they’ll expect him to be wiser and steadier that his own grandfather, if so be’s he ever had a grandfather, which is doubtful. It seems uncanny to think of a child at Green Gables somehow; there’s never been one there, for Matthew and Marilla were grown up when the new house was built — if they ever WERE children, which is hard to believe when one looks at them. I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything. My, but I pity him, that’s what.”
So said Mrs. Rachel to the wild rose bushes out of the fulness of her heart; but if she could have seen the child who was waiting patiently at the Bright River station at that very moment her pity would have been still deeper and more profound.
Chapter II. Matthew Cuthbert Is Surprised
Matthew Cuthbert and the sorrel mare jogged comfortably over the eight miles to Bright River. It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom. The air was sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the distance to horizon mists of pearl and purple; while
“The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year.”
Matthew enjoyed the drive after his own fashion, except during the moments when he met women and had to nod to them — for in Prince Edward island you are supposed to nod to all and sundry you meet on the road whether you know them or not.
Matthew dreaded all women except Marilla and Mrs. Rachel; he had an uncomfortable feeling that the mysterious creatures were secretly laughing at him. He may have been quite right in thinking so, for he was an odd-looking personage, with an ungainly figure and long iron-gray hair that touched his stooping shoulders, and a full, soft brown beard which he had worn ever since he was twenty. In fact, he had looked at twenty very much as he looked at sixty, lacking a little of the grayness.
When he reached Bright River there was no sign of any train; he thought he was too early, so he tied his horse in the yard of the small Bright River hotel and went over to the station house. The long platform was almost deserted; the only living creature in sight being a girl who was sitting on a pile of shingles at the extreme end. Matthew, barely noting that it WAS a girl, sidled past her as quickly as possible without looking at her. Had he looked he could hardly have failed to notice the tense rigidity and expectation of her attitude and expression. She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her might and main.
Matthew encountered the stationmaster locking up the ticket office preparatory to going home for supper, and asked him if the five-thirty train would soon be along.
“The five-thirty train has been in and gone half an hour ago,” answered that brisk official. “But there was a passenger dropped off for you — a little girl. She’s sitting out there on the shingles. I asked her to go into the ladies’ waiting room, but she informed me gravely that she preferred to stay outside. ‘There was more scope for imagination,’ she said. She’s a case, I should say.”
“I’m not expecting a girl,” said Matthew blankly. “It’s a boy I’ve come for. He should be here. Mrs. Alexander Spencer was to bring him over from Nova Scotia for me.”
The stationmaster whistled.
“Guess there’s some mistake,” he said. “Mrs. Spencer came off the train with that girl and gave her into my charge. Said you and your sister were adopting her from an orphan asylum and that you would be along for her presently. That’s all I know about it — and I haven’t got any more orphans concealed hereabouts.”
“I don’t understand,” said Matthew helplessly, wishing that Marilla was at hand to cope with the situation.
“Well, you’d better question the girl,” said the stationmaster carelessly. “I dare say she’ll be able to explain — she’s got a tongue of her own, that’s certain. Maybe they were out of boys of the brand you wanted.”
He walked jauntily away, being hungry, and the unfortunate Matthew was left to do that which was harder for him than bearding a lion in its den — walk up to a girl — a strange girl — an orphan girl — and demand of her why she wasn’t a boy. Matthew groaned in spirit as he turned about and shuffled gently down the platform towards her.
She had been watching him ever since he had passed her and she had her eyes on him now. Matthew was not looking at her and would not have seen what she was really like if he had been, but an ordinary observer would have seen this: A child of about eleven, garbed in a very short, very tight, very ugly dress of yellowish-gray wincey. She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair. Her face was small, white and thin, also much freckled; her mouth was large and so were her eyes, which looked green in some lights and moods and gray in others.
So far, the ordinary observer; an extraordinary observer might have seen that the chin was very pointed and pronounced; that the big eyes were full of spirit and vivacity; that the mouth was sweet-lipped and expressive; that the forehead was broad and full; in short, our discerning extraordinary observer might have concluded that no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.
Matthew, however, was spared the ordeal of speaking first, for as soon as she concluded that he was coming to her she stood up, grasping with one thin brown hand the handle of a shabby, old-fashioned carpet-bag; the other she held out to him.
“I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?” she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice. “I’m very glad to see you. I was beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming for me and I was imagining all the things that might have happened to prevent you. I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight I’d go down the track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn’t you? And I was quite sure you would come for me in the morning, if you didn’t tonight.”
Matthew had taken the scrawny little hand awkwardly in his; then and there he decided what to do. He could not tell this child with the glowing eyes that there had been a mistake; he would take her home and let Marilla do that. She couldn’t be left at Bright River anyhow, no matter what mistake had been made, so all questions and explanations might as well be deferred until he was safely back at Green Gables.
“I’m sorry I was late,” he said shyly. “Come along. The horse is over in the yard. Give me your bag.”
“Oh, I can carry it,” the child responded cheerfully. “It isn’t heavy. I’ve got all my worldly goods in it, but it isn’t heavy. And if it isn’t carried in just a certain way the handle pulls out — so I’d better keep it because I know the exact knack of it. It’s an extremely old carpet-bag. Oh, I’m very glad you’ve come, even if it would have been nice to sleep in a wild cherry-tree. We’ve got to drive a long piece, haven’t we? Mrs. Spencer said it was eight miles. I’m glad because I love driving. Oh, it seems so wonderful that I’m going to live with you and belong to you. I’ve never belonged to anybody — not really. But the asylum was the worst. I’ve only been in it four months, but that was enough. I don’t suppose you ever were an orphan in an asylum, so you can’t possibly understand what it is like. It’s worse than anything you could imagine. Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn’t mean to be wicked. It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it? They were good, you know — the asylum people. But there is so little scope for the imagination in an asylum — only just in the other orphans. It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them — to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess. I used to lie awake at nights and imagine things like that, because I didn’t have time in the day. I guess that’s why I’m so thin — I AM dreadful thin, ain’t I? There isn’t a pick on my bones. I do love to imagine I’m nice and plump, with dimples in my elbows.”
With this Matthew’s companion stopped talking, partly because she was out of breath and partly because they had reached the buggy. Not another word did she say until they had left the village and were driving down a steep little hill, the road part of which had been cut so deeply into the soft soil, that the banks, fringed with blooming wild cherry-trees and slim white birches, were several feet above their heads.
The child put out her hand and broke off a branch of wild plum that brushed against the side of the buggy.
“Isn’t that beautiful? What did that tree, leaning out from the bank, all white and lacy, make you think of?” she asked.
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Why, a bride, of course — a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil. I’ve never seen one, but I can imagine what she would look like. I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will ever want to marry me — unless it might be a foreign missionary. I suppose a foreign missionary mightn’t be very particular. But I do hope that some day I shall have a white dress. That is my highest ideal of earthly bliss. I just love pretty clothes. And I’ve never had a pretty dress in my life that I can remember — but of course it’s all the more to look forward to, isn’t it? And then I can imagine that I’m dressed gorgeously. This morning when I left the asylum I felt so ashamed because I had to wear this horrid old wincey dress. All the orphans had to wear them, you know. A merchant in Hopeton last winter donated three hundred yards of wincey to the asylum. Some people said it was because he couldn’t sell it, but I’d rather believe that it was out of the kindness of his heart, wouldn’t you? When we got on the train I felt as if everybody must be looking at me and pitying me. But I just went to work and imagined that I had on the most beautiful pale blue silk dress — because when you ARE imagining you might as well imagine something worth while — and a big hat all flowers and nodding plumes, and a gold watch, and kid gloves and boots. I felt cheered up right away and I enjoyed my trip to the Island with all my might. I wasn’t a bit sick coming over in the boat. Neither was Mrs. Spencer although she generally is. She said she hadn’t time to get sick, watching to see that I didn’t fall overboard. She said she never saw the beat of me for prowling about. But if it kept her from being seasick it’s a mercy I did prowl, isn’t it? And I wanted to see everything that was to be seen on that boat, because I didn’t know whether I’d ever have another opportunity. Oh, there are a lot more cherry-trees all in bloom! This Island is the bloomiest place. I just love it already, and I’m so glad I’m going to live here. I’ve always heard that Prince Edward Island was the prettiest place in the world, and I used to imagine I was living here, but I never really expected I would. It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it? But those red roads are so funny. When we got into the train at Charlottetown and the red roads began to flash past I asked Mrs. Spencer what made them red and she said she didn’t know and for pity’s sake not to ask her any more questions. She said I must have asked her a thousand already. I suppose I had, too, but how you going to find out about things if you don’t ask questions? And what DOES make the roads red?”
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive — it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult.”
Matthew, much to his own surprise, was enjoying himself. Like most quiet folks he liked talkative people when they were willing to do the talking themselves and did not expect him to keep up his end of it. But he had never expected to enjoy the society of a little girl. Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse. He detested the way they had of sidling past him timidly, with sidewise glances, as if they expected him to gobble them up at a mouthful if they ventured to say a word. That was the Avonlea type of well-bred little girl. But this freckled witch was very different, and although he found it rather difficult for his slower intelligence to keep up with her brisk mental processes he thought that he “kind of liked her chatter.” So he said as shyly as usual:
“Oh, you can talk as much as you like. I don’t mind.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I know you and I are going to get along together fine. It’s such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I’ve had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?”
“Well now, that seems reasonable,” said Matthew.
