The Complete Short Stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud Montgomery

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СКАЧАТЬ surprised,” said Peter, shaking hands. “I saw you go past the field and I tied the horses and followed you down through the woods. I’ve been sitting on the fence back yonder, watching your comings and goings.” “Why didn’t you come and speak to me at church yesterday, Peter?” demanded Nancy boldly.

      “I was afraid I would say something ungrammatical,” answered Peter drily.

      The crimson flamed over Nancy’s face again. She pulled her hand away.

      “That’s cruel of you, Peter.”

      Peter suddenly laughed. There was a note of boyishness in the laughter.

      “So it is,” he said, “but I had to get rid of the accumulated malice and spite of twenty years somehow. It’s all gone now, and I’ll be as amiable as I know how. But since you have gone to the trouble of getting my supper for me, Nancy, you must stay and help me eat it. Them strawberries look good. I haven’t had any this summer — been too busy to pick them.”

      Nancy stayed. She sat at the head of Peter’s table and poured his tea for him. She talked to him wittily of the Avonlea people and the changes in their old set. Peter followed her lead with an apparent absence of self-consciousness, eating his supper like a man whose heart and mind were alike on good terms with him. Nancy felt wretched — and, at the same time, ridiculously happy. It seemed the most grotesque thing in the world that she should be presiding there at Peter’s table, and yet the most natural. There were moments when she felt like crying — other moments when her laughter was as ready and spontaneous as a girl’s. Sentiment and humour had always waged an equal contest in Nancy’s nature.

      When Peter had finished his strawberries he folded his arms on the table and looked admiringly at Nancy.

      “You look well at the head of a table, Nancy,” he said critically. “How is it that you haven’t been presiding at one of your own long before this? I thought you’d meet a lots of men out in the world that you’d like — men who talked good grammar.”

      “Peter, don’t!” said Nancy, wincing. “I was a goose.”

      “No, you were quite right. I was a tetchy fool. If I’d had any sense, I’d have felt thankful you thought enough of me to want to improve me, and I’d have tried to kerrect my mistakes instead of getting mad. It’s too late now, I suppose.”

      “Too late for what?” said Nancy, plucking up heart of grace at something in Peter’s tone and look.

      “For — kerrecting mistakes.”

      “Grammatical ones?”

      “Not exactly. I guess them mistakes are past kerrecting in an old fellow like me. Worse mistakes, Nancy. I wonder what you would say if I asked you to forgive me, and have me after all.”

      “I’d snap you up before you’d have time to change your mind,” said Nancy brazenly. She tried to look Peter in the face, but her blue eyes, where tears and mirth were blending, faltered down before his gray ones.

      Peter stood up, knocking over his chair, and strode around the table to her.

      “Nancy, my girl!” he said.

       FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA

      Main TOC

CONTENTS

       AUNT CYNTHIA’S PERSIAN CAT

       THE MATERIALIZING OF CECIL

       HER FATHER’S DAUGHTER

       JANE’S BABY

       THE DREAM-CHILD

       THE BROTHER WHO FAILED

       THE RETURN OF HESTER

       THE LITTLE BROWN BOOK OF MISS EMILY

       SARA’S WAY

       THE SON OF HIS MOTHER

       THE EDUCATION OF BETTY

       IN HER SELFLESS MOOD

       THE CONSCIENCE CASE OF DAVID BELL

       ONLY A COMMON FELLOW

       TANNIS OF THE FLATS

      INTRODUCTION

      Table of Contents

      It is no exaggeration to say that what Longfellow did for Acadia, Miss Montgomery has done for Prince Edward Island. More than a million readers, young people as well as their parents and uncles and aunts, possess in the picture-galleries of their memories the exquisite landscapes of Avonlea, limned with as poetic a pencil as Longfellow wielded when he told the ever-moving story of Grand Pre.

      Only genius of the first water has the ability to conjure up such a character as Anne Shirley, the heroine of Miss Montgomery’s first novel, “Anne of Green Gables,” and to surround her with people so distinctive, so real, so true to psychology. Anne is as lovable a child as lives in all fiction. Natasha in Count Tolstoi’s great novel, “War and Peace,” dances into our ken, with something of the same buoyancy and naturalness; but into what a commonplace young woman she develops! Anne, whether as the gay little orphan in her conquest of the master and mistress of Green Gables, or as the maturing and self-forgetful maiden of Avonlea, keeps up to concert-pitch in her charm and her winsomeness. There is nothing in her to disappoint hope or imagination.

      Part of the power of Miss Montgomery — and the largest part — is due to her skill in compounding humor and pathos. The humor is honest and golden; it never wearies the reader; the pathos is never sentimentalized, never degenerates into bathos, is never morbid. This combination holds СКАЧАТЬ