Rainbow Valley (Unabridged). Lucy Maud Montgomery

to church next day every female eye saw that button and the peace of the Ladies’ Aid was upset for weeks.

      Carl had the clear, bright, dark-blue eyes, fearless and direct, of his dead mother, and her brown hair with its glints of gold. He knew the secrets of bugs and had a sort of freemasonry with bees and beetles. Una never liked to sit near him because she never knew what uncanny creature might be secreted about him. Jerry refused to sleep with him because Carl had once taken a young garter snake to bed with him; so Carl slept in his old cot, which was so short that he could never stretch out, and had strange bedfellows. Perhaps it was just as well that Aunt Martha was half blind when she made that bed. Altogether they were a jolly, lovable little crew, and Cecilia Meredith’s heart must have ached bitterly when she faced the knowledge that she must leave them.

      “Where would you like to be buried if you were a Methodist?” asked Faith cheerfully.

      This opened up an interesting field of speculation.

      “There isn’t much choice. The place is full,” said Jerry. “I’D like that corner near the road, I guess. I could hear the teams going past and the people talking.”

      “I’d like that little hollow under the weeping birch,” said Una. “That birch is such a place for birds and they sing like mad in the mornings.”

      “I’d take the Porter lot where there’s so many children buried. I like lots of company,” said Faith. “Carl, where’d you?”

      “I’d rather not be buried at all,” said Carl, “but if I had to be

       I’d like the ant-bed. Ants are AWF’LY int’resting.”

      “How very good all the people who are buried here must have been,” said Una, who had been reading the laudatory old epitaphs. “There doesn’t seem to be a single bad person in the whole graveyard. Methodists must be better than Presbyterians after all.”

      “Maybe the Methodists bury their bad people just like they do cats,” suggested Carl. “Maybe they don’t bother bringing them to the graveyard at all.”

      “Nonsense,” said Faith. “The people that are buried here weren’t any better than other folks, Una. But when anyone is dead you mustn’t say anything of him but good or he’ll come back and ha’nt you. Aunt Martha told me that. I asked father if it was true and he just looked through me and muttered, ‘True? True? What is truth? What IS truth, O jesting Pilate?’ I concluded from that it must be true.”

      “I wonder if Mr. Alec Davis would come back and ha’nt me if I threw a stone at the urn on top of his tombstone,” said Jerry.

      “Mrs. Davis would,” giggled Faith. “She just watches us in church like a cat watching mice. Last Sunday I made a face at her nephew and he made one back at me and you should have seen her glare. I’ll bet she boxed HIS ears when they got out. Mrs. Marshall Elliott told me we mustn’t offend her on any account or I’d have made a face at her, too!”

      “They say Jem Blythe stuck out his tongue at her once and she would never have his father again, even when her husband was dying,” said Jerry. “I wonder what the Blythe gang will be like.”

      “I liked their looks,” said Faith. The manse children had been at the station that afternoon when the Blythe small fry had arrived. “I liked Jem’s looks ESPECIALLY.”

      “They say in school that Walter’s a sissy,” said Jerry.

      “I don’t believe it,” said Una, who had thought Walter very handsome.

      “Well, he writes poetry, anyhow. He won the prize the teacher offered last year for writing a poem, Bertie Shakespeare Drew told me. Bertie’s mother thought HE should have got the prize because of his name, but Bertie said he couldn’t write poetry to save his soul, name or no name.”

      “I suppose we’ll get acquainted with them as soon as they begin going to school,” mused Faith. “I hope the girls are nice. I don’t like most of the girls round here. Even the nice ones are poky. But the Blythe twins look jolly. I thought twins always looked alike, but they don’t. I think the redhaired one is the nicest.”

      “I liked their mother’s looks,” said Una with a little sigh. Una envied all children their mothers. She had been only six when her mother died, but she had some very precious memories, treasured in her soul like jewels, of twilight cuddlings and morning frolics, of loving eyes, a tender voice, and the sweetest, gayest laugh.

      “They say she isn’t like other people,” said Jerry.

      “Mrs. Elliot says that is because she never really grew up,” said

       Faith.

      “She’s taller than Mrs. Elliott.”

      “Yes, yes, but it is inside — Mrs. Elliot says Mrs. Blythe just stayed a little girl inside.”

      “What do I smell?” interrupted Carl, sniffing.

      They all smelled it now. A most delectable odour came floating up on the still evening air from the direction of the little woodsy dell below the manse hill.

      “That makes me hungry,” said Jerry.

      “We had only bread and molasses for supper and cold ditto for dinner,” said Una plaintively.

      Aunt Martha’s habit was to boil a large slab of mutton early in the week and serve it up every day, cold and greasy, as long as it lasted. To this Faith, in a moment of inspiration, had give the name of “ditto”, and by this it was invariably known at the manse.

      “Let’s go and see where that smell is coming from,” said Jerry.

      They all sprang up, frolicked over the lawn with the abandon of young puppies, climbed a fence, and tore down the mossy slope, guided by the savory lure that ever grew stronger. A few minutes later they arrived breathlessly in the sanctum sanctorum of Rainbow Valley where the Blythe children were just about to give thanks and eat.

      They halted shyly. Una wished they had not been so precipitate: but Di Blythe was equal to that and any occasion. She stepped forward, with a comrade’s smile.

      “I guess I know who you are,” she said. “You belong to the manse, don’t you?”

      Faith nodded, her face creased by dimples.

      “We smelled your trout cooking and wondered what it was.”

      “You must sit down and help us eat them,” said Di.

      “Maybe you haven’t more than you want yourselves,” said Jerry, looking hungrily at the tin platter.

      “We’ve heaps — three apiece,” said Jem. “Sit down.”

      No more ceremony was necessary. Down they all sat on mossy stones. Merry was that feast and long. Nan and Di would probably have died of horror had they known what Faith and Una knew perfectly well — that Carl had two young mice in his jacket pocket. But they never knew it, so it never hurt them. Where can folks get better acquainted than over a meal table? When the last trout had vanished, the manse children and the Ingleside children were sworn friends and allies. They had always known each other and always would. The race of Joseph recognized its own.

      They poured out the history of their little pasts. The manse children heard of Avonlea and Green Gables, of Rainbow Valley traditions, and of the little house by the harbour shore where Jem had been born. The Ingleside children heard of Maywater, where the Merediths had lived before coming to the Glen, of Una’s beloved, one-eyed doll and Faith’s pet rooster.

      Faith was inclined to resent the fact that people laughed at her for petting a rooster. She liked the Blythes because they accepted it without question.

      “A handsome rooster like Adam is just as nice a pet as a dog or cat, I think,” she said. “If he was a canary nobody would wonder. And I brought him up from a little, wee, yellow chicken. Mrs. Johnson at Maywater gave him to me. A weasel had killed all his brothers and sisters. I called him after her husband.