Anne of Avonlea
fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter
echoed down to him.
“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was
saying, with true Anneish philosophy. “Let’s try to make this a really
golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight.
We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. ‘Begone, dull
care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school
yesterday.”
“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.
“Oh, I know the expression . . . I’ve felt it often enough on my own
face. But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear. It will keep till
Monday . . . or if it doesn’t so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see
that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery.
When I’m eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . . I shall shut my eyes
and see those violets just as I see them now. That’s the first good
gift our day has given us.”
“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet,” said
Priscilla.
Anne glowed.
“I’m so glad you _spoke_ that thought, Priscilla, instead of just
thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more
interesting place . . . although it _is_ very interesting anyhow . . .
if people spoke out their real thoughts.”
“It would be too hot to hold some folks,” quoted Jane sagely.
“I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking
nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are
going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just
what comes into her head. _That_ is conversation. Here’s a little path
I never saw before. Let’s explore it.”
The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single
file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs
were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were
smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing
things.
“What a lot of elephant’s ears,” exclaimed Diana. “I’m going to pick a
big bunch, they’re so pretty.”
“How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a
dreadful name?” asked Priscilla.
“Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at
all or else far too much,” said Anne, “Oh, girls, look at that!”
“That” was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade
where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up and
its place filled with a rank growth of ferns; but now it was a
glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A ring
of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its
margin.
“_How_ sweet!” said Jane.
“Let us dance around it like wood-nymphs,” cried Anne, dropping her
basket and extending her hands.
But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane’s
rubbers came off.
“You can’t be a wood-nymph if you have to wear rubbers,” was her
decision.
“Well, we must name this place before we leave it,” said Anne, yielding
to the indisputable logic of facts. “Everybody suggest a name and we’ll
draw lots. Diana?”
“Birch Pool,” suggested Diana promptly.
“Crystal Lake,” said Jane.
Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to
perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with
“Glimmer-glass.” Anne’s selection was “The Fairies’ Mirror.”
The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil
Schoolma’am Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne’s hat.
Then Priscilla shut her eyes and drew one. “Crystal Lake,” read Jane
triumphantly. Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had
played the pool a shabby trick she did not say so.
Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young
green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture. Across it they
found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to
explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty
surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of
wild cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their
arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the
lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and
dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of
sky or sunlight to be seen.
“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne. “They are
impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not
allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around
that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big
freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the
sunshiny places.”
“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be nice to
have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one? What would you
wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I’d wish to be rich
and beautiful and clever.”
“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.
“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla. Anne thought of her hair
and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.
“I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and
all our lives,” she said.
“But that,” said Priscilla, “would be just wishing this world were like
heaven.”
“Only like a part of heaven. In the other parts there would be summer
and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too. I think I want
glittering snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes. Don’t
you, Jane?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” said Jane uncomfortably. Jane was a good girl,
a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her
profession and believed everything she had been taught. But she never
thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.
“Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses
every day in heaven,” laughed Diana.
“And didn’t you tell her we would?” asked Anne.
“Mercy, no! I told her we wouldn’t be thinking of dresses at all
there.”
“Oh, I think we will . . . a _little_,” said Anne earnestly. “There’ll
be plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more
important things. I believe we’ll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I
suppose _raiment_ would be a more suitable way of speaking. I shall
want to wear pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me
that long to get tired of it, I feel sure. I do love pink so and I can
never wear it in _this_ world.”
Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open where a
log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit
beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the
leaves fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous
sunshine. Then more wild cherries, and a little valley of lissome firs,
and then a hill so steep that the girls lost their breath climbing it;
but when they reached the top and came out into the open the prettiest
surprise of all awaited them.
Beyond were the “back fields” of the farms that ran out to the upper
Carmody road. Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open
to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden . . . or what had
once been a garden. A tumbledown stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and
grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry
trees, white as a snowdrift. There were traces of old paths still and a
double line of rosebushes through the middle; but all the rest of the
space was a sheet of yellow and white narcissi, in their airiest, most
lavish, wind-swayed bloom above the lush green grasses.
“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” three of the girls cried. Anne only gazed
in eloquent silence.
“How in the world does it happen that there ever was a garden back
here?” said Priscilla in amazement.
“It must be Hester Gray’s garden,” said Diana. “I’ve heard mother speak
of it but I never saw it before, and I wouldn’t have supposed that it
could be in existence still. You’ve heard the story, Anne?”
“No, but the name seems familiar to me.”
“Oh, you’ve seen it in the graveyard. She is buried down there in the
poplar corner. You know the little brown stone with the opening gates
carved on it and ‘Sacred to the memory of Hester Gray, aged
twenty-two.’ Jordan Gray is buried right beside her but there’s no
stone to him. It’s a wonder Marilla never told you about it, Anne. To
be sure, it happened thirty years ago and everybody has forgotten.”
“Well, if there’s a story we must have it,” said Anne. “Let’s sit right
down here among the narcissi and Diana will tell it. Why, girls, there
are hundreds of them . . . they’ve spread over everything. It looks as
if the garden were carpeted with moonshine and sunshine combined. This
is a discovery worth making. To think that I’ve lived within a mile of
this place for six years and have never seen it before! Now, Diana.”
“Long ago,” began Diana, “this farm belonged to old Mr. David Gray. He
didn’t live on it . . . he lived where Silas Sloane lives now. He had
one son, Jordan, and he went up to Boston one winter to work and while
he was there he fell in love with a girl named Hester Murray. She was
working in a store and she hated it. She’d been brought up in the
country and she always wanted to get back. When Jordan asked her to
marry him she said she would if he’d take her away to some quiet spot
where she’d see nothing but fields and trees. So he brought her to
Avonlea. Mrs. Lynde said he was taking a fearful risk in marrying a
Yankee, and it’s certain that Hester was very delicate and a very poor
housekeeper; but mother says she was very pretty and sweet and Jordan
just worshipped the ground she walked on. Well, Mr. Gray gave Jordan
this farm and he built a little house back here and Jordan and Hester
lived in it for four years. She never went out much and hardly anybody
went to see her except mother and Mrs. Lynde. Jordan made her this
garden and she was crazy about it and spent most of her time in it. She
wasn’t much of a housekeeper but she had a knack with flowers. And then
she got sick. Mother says she thinks she was in consumption before she
ever came here. She never really laid up but just grew weaker and
weaker all the time. Jordan wouldn’t have anybody to wait on her. He
did it all himself and mother says he was as tender and gentle as a
woman. Every day he’d wrap her in a shawl and carry her out to the
garden and she’d lie there on a bench quite happy. They say she used to
make Jordan kneel down by her every night and morning and pray with her
that she might die out in the garden when the time came. And her prayer
was answered. One day Jordan carried her out to the bench and then he
picked all the roses that were out and heaped them over her; and she
just smiled up at him . . . and closed her eyes . . . and that,”
concluded Diana softly, “was the end.”
“Oh, what a dear story,” sighed Anne, wiping away her tears.
“What became of Jordan?” asked Priscilla.
“He sold the farm after Hester died and went back to Boston. Mr. Jabez
Sloane bought the farm and hauled the little house out to the road.
Jordan died about ten years after and he was brought home and buried
beside Hester.”
“I can’t understand how she could have wanted to live back here, away
from everything,” said Jane.
“Oh, I can easily understand _that_,” said Anne thoughtfully. “I
wouldn’t want it myself for a steady thing, because, although I love
the fields and woods, I love people too. But I can understand it in
Hester. She was tired to death of the noise of the big city and the
crowds of people always coming and going and caring nothing for her.
She just wanted to escape from it all to some still, green, friendly