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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.
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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
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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
Chapter of 56
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.' [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]