Avonsyde

“ From the date of the disinheritance of the elder branch the family never regained either their wealth or prestige; generation after generation the Lovels dwindled in strength and became less and less able to cope with their sturdier neighbors. The last squire of Avonsyde had one sickly son and two daughters; the son married, but died before his father, leaving no son to inherit the old place. ”

“ You had better eat your toast while it is hot and crisp, Mrs. Lovel. The good gentleman from Australia hasn’t to go to the old ladies with a character in his hand, like a servant looking for a situation?”
“No, no. Nancy; but he has to bring letters and other tokens to prove his son’s descent, to prove that his son is a true Lovel of Avonsyde of the elder branch, and unfortunately Mr. Lovel has lost some valuable letters and an old silver tankard which has been for hundreds of years in the family, and which was taken from Avonsyde by the Rupert Lovel who quarreled with his relations.” ”

“ The loss of the tankard was certainly disquieting, but she felt sure that with the aid of the stolen letters she could substantiate her boy’s claim, and she also reflected that if the tankard was lost to her it was also lost to her brother-in-law, Rupert Lovel.
So life went quite smoothly at Avonsyde, and day after day the weather became more balmy and springlike, and day after day Miss Griselda’s face wore a softer and gentler expression; for the little heir-apparent was altogether after her own heart, and she was contented, as all women are when they find a worthy object to love. ”

“ Baring say that many false heirs had laid claim to Avonsyde? The old ladies want some one who can prove his descent, and we have not got all the papers—have we, father?”
“No. It is an extraordinary thing about those letters being lost, and also the old tankard. But they are safe to turn up. Who could have stolen them? Perhaps Gabrielle has already written with news of their safety. We might have a cab now to the General Post-office. I have no doubt a budget of letters awaits me there. Why, Rupert, what are you looking so melancholy about? The tankard and the letters may even now be found. ”

“ But just this minute I’m well content to be Anne Shirley, Avonlea schoolma’am, driving over a road like this on such a sweet, friendly day.”
“It’s a lovely day but we have anything but a lovely task before us,” sighed Diana. “Why on earth did you offer to canvass this road, Anne? Almost all the cranks in Avonlea live along it, and we’ll probably be treated as if we were begging for ourselves. It’s the very worst road of all.”
“That is why I chose it. Of course Gilbert and Fred would have taken this road if we had asked them. ”

“ She was slim and lithe as a young, white-stemmed birch tree; her hair was like a soft, dusky cloud; and her eyes were as blue as Avonlea harbor on a fair twilight, when all the sky is abloom over it. She had dark lashes, and a little red mouth that quivered when she was very sad or very happy, or when she loved very much—quivered like a crimson rose too rudely shaken by the wind. At such times what was a man to do save kiss it?
The next spring we were married, and I brought her home to my gray old homestead on the gray old harbor shore. A lonely place for a young bride, said Avonlea people. ”

“ Rachel’s opinions concerning any person, place, or thing, were always warranted to wear. “What’s this I hear about your going to start up a Village Improvement Society, Anne?”
“I was just talking it over with some of the girls and boys at the last Debating Club,” said Anne, flushing. “They thought it would be rather nice . . . and so do Mr. and Mrs. Allan. Lots of villages have them now.”
“Well, you’ll get into no end of hot water if you do. Better leave it alone, Anne, that’s what. People don’t like being improved.”
“Oh, we are not going to try to improve the people. It is Avonlea itself. ”

“ It was at Allanwater, a small villa amidst the mountains, in the county of Leitrim, that Lord and Lady Avondale passed the first months of their marriage. This estate had been settled upon Sir Richard Mowbray, during his lifetime, by his brother, the late Earl of Avondale. It was cheerful, though retired; and to Calantha’s enchanted eyes, appeared all that was most romantic and beautiful upon earth. What indeed had not appeared beautiful to her in the company of the man she loved! Every one fancies that there exists in the object of their peculiar admiration a superiority over others. ”

“ Aunt Cynthia "always gave you the impression of a full-rigged ship coming gallantly on before a favorable wind;" no further description is needed—only one such personage could be found in Avonlea. You would recognize her at sight. Ismay Meade's disposition is summed up when we are told that she is "good at having presentiments—after things happen." What cleverer embodiment of innate obstinacy than in Isabella Spencer—"a wisp of a woman who looked as if a breath would sway her but was so set in her ways that a tornado would hardly have caused her to swerve an inch from her chosen path;" ”

“ Rachel was not far astray in this estimate. Anne’s heart was bent on forming the Improvement Society. Gilbert Blythe, who was to teach in White Sands but would always be home from Friday night to Monday morning, was enthusiastic about it; and most of the other young folks were willing to go in for anything that meant occasional meetings and consequently some “fun.” As for what the “improvements” were to be, nobody had any very clear idea except Anne and Gilbert. They had talked them over and planned them out until an ideal Avonlea existed in their minds, if nowhere else. ”

“ Lynde would ask you the next day how your cold was!”
“I believe he did,” admitted Marilla. “I was away. He gave Anne a piece of his mind.”
“I think he is a very disagreeable man,” said Anne, with a resentful toss of her ruddy head.
“You never said a truer word,” said Mrs. Rachel solemnly. “I knew there’d be trouble when Robert Bell sold his place to a New Brunswick man, that’s what. I don’t know what Avonlea is coming to, with so many strange people rushing into it. It’ll soon not be safe to go to sleep in our beds.” ”

“ In the week that followed Nancy enjoyed herself after her own fashion. She read and swung in the garden, having a hammock hung under the firs. She went far afield, in rambles to woods and lonely uplands.
“I like it much better than meeting people,” she said, when Louisa suggested going to see this one and that one, “especially the Avonlea people. All my old chums are gone, or hopelessly married and changed, and the young set who have come up know not Joseph, and make me feel uncomfortably middle-aged. It’s far worse to feel middle-aged than old, you know. ”

“ They drove along in silence, past the snow-powdered hedges of spruce, and under the arches of the forest roadways. They were late, and a great stillness was over all the land. David Bell never spoke. All his usual cheerful talkativeness had disappeared since the revival meetings had begun in Avonlea. From the first he had gone about as a man over whom some strange doom is impending, seemingly oblivious to all that might be said or thought of him in his own family or in the church. Mary Bell thought she would go out of her mind if her husband continued to act in this way. ”

“ Major Spencer has decided to set out a row of white birches all along the road front of his farm, by way of encouraging the A.V.I.S.,” said Gilbert. “He was talking to me about it today. Major Spencer is the most progressive and public-spirited man in Avonlea. And Mr. William Bell is going to set out a spruce hedge along his road front and up his lane. Our Society is getting on splendidly, Anne. It is past the experimental stage and is an accepted fact. The older folks are beginning to take an interest in it and the White Sands people are talking of starting one too. ”

“ She knew this must be Paul Irving and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde had been right for once when she prophesied that he would be unlike the Avonlea children. More than that, Anne realized that he was unlike other children anywhere, and that there was a soul subtly akin to her own gazing at her out of the very dark blue eyes that were watching her so intently.
She knew Paul was ten but he looked no more than eight. He had the most beautiful little face she had ever seen in a child . . . features of exquisite delicacy and refinement, framed in a halo of chestnut curls. ”

“ By the way, I can’t realize that we really have telephones in Avonlea now. It sounds so preposterously up-to-date and modernish for this darling, leisurely old place.”
“We can thank the A. V. I. S. for them,” said Diana. “We should never have got the line if they hadn’t taken the matter up and carried it through. There was enough cold water thrown to discourage any society. But they stuck to it, nevertheless. You did a splendid thing for Avonlea when you founded that society, Anne. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But no living man or woman approached us. The village was given up to peace or sleep or death.
Returning, we paused on the brow of the slope above Avon for a longer look. At our feet was spread the vale of Evesham; the river, bordered with meadows as green and flat as billiard-tables; the stream of Arrow to northward, which rises in the Lickey Hills, and comes down through Alcester to join the Avon here; the villages of Salford Priors and Salford Abbots; farther to the west, among its apple-trees, the roofs and gables of Salford Nunnery, the village of Harvington. ”

“ Mrs. Rachel Lynde said. Mrs. Rachel was an outspoken lady, as those of you who may have already made her acquaintance will remember. Mr. Harrison was certainly different from other people . . . and that is the essential characteristic of a crank, as everybody knows.
In the first place he kept house for himself and had publicly stated that he wanted no fools of women around his diggings. Feminine Avonlea took its revenge by the grewsome tales it related about his housekeeping and cooking. He had hired little John Henry Carter of White Sands and John Henry started the stories. ”

“ Anne felt at peace with the world and herself as she walked down the hill with her basket of flowers in her hand. Since the earliest mayflowers Anne had never missed her weekly pilgrimage to Matthew’s grave. Everyone else in Avonlea, except Marilla, had already forgotten quiet, shy, unimportant Matthew Cuthbert; but his memory was still green in Anne’s heart and always would be. She could never forget the kind old man who had been the first to give her the love and sympathy her starved childhood had craved. ”

“ He rushed towards her apartment. Sir Richard was with him. “By G—d, Avondale, if you forgive her, I will never see you more. Whilst I live, she shall never dwell in my house.” “Then mine shall shelter her,” said Lord Avondale, breaking from Sir Richard’s grasp: “this is too much;” and with an air of kindness, with a manner gentle and affectionate, Lord Avondale now entered, and approached his wife. “Calantha,” 160 he said, “do not thus give way to the violence of your feelings. I wish not to appear stern.—My God! what is the matter?” “Your poor lady is dying,” said the nurse. ”

“ Three miles, bearing to the right, bring the traveller down to the Avon estuary again, at the hillside and waterside village of Pill; a queer little place, clinging and huddling closely to the steep banks, and ending in a short quay, where pilots and other strange waterside folk lean and sit on walls and look across to Avonmouth, plainly visible on the Gloucestershire shore, at the meeting 18of the Avon and the Bristol Channel ”

“ Few of the Lincolns or Carewes had married young, many not at all. And, to her, Chester was her baby still. He belonged solely to her.
And now another woman had dared to look upon him with eyes of love. Damaris Garland! Thyra now remembered seeing her. She was a new-comer in Avonlea, having come to live with her uncle and aunt after the death of her mother. Thyra had met her on the bridge one day a month previously. Yes, a man might think she was pretty—a low-browed girl, with a wave of reddish-gold hair, and crimson lips blossoming out against the strange, milk-whiteness of her skin. ”

“ An Avonlea Scandal
One blithe June morning, a fortnight after Uncle Abe’s storm, Anne came slowly through the Green Gables yard from the garden, carrying in her hands two blighted stalks of white narcissus.
“Look, Marilla,” she said sorrowfully, holding up the flowers before the eyes of a grim lady, with her hair coifed in a green gingham apron, who was going into the house with a plucked chicken, “these are the only buds the storm spared . . . and even they are imperfect. I’m so sorry . . . I wanted some for Matthew’s grave. He was always so fond of June lilies.” ”

“ Anne shook her head.
“No, it’s no use to worry Mr. Allan, especially now when the baby’s so sick. Judson would slip away from him as smoothly as from us, although he has taken to going to church quite regularly just now. That is simply because Louisa Spencer’s father is an elder and very particular about such things.”
“Judson Parker is the only man in Avonlea who would dream of renting his fences,” said Jane indignantly. “Even Levi Boulter or Lorenzo White would never stoop to that, tight fisted as they are. They would have too much respect for public opinion.” ”