Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery Read Free Book Online

am sitting here in my room at twilight. The window is open and the frogs are singing of something that happened very long ago. All along the middle garden walk the Gay Folk are holding up great fluted cups of ruby and gold and pearl. It is not raining now, but it rained all day – a rain scented with lilacs. I like all kinds of weather and I like rainy days – soft, misty, rainy days when the Wind Woman just shakes the tops of the spruces gently; and wild, tempestuous, streaming rainy days. I like being shut in by the rain – I like to hear it thudding on the roof, and beating on the panes and pouring off the eaves, while the Wind Woman skirls like a mad old witch in the woods, and through the garden.
    “Still, if it rains when I want to go anywhere I growl just as much as anybody!
    “An evening like this always makes me think of that spring Father died, three years ago, and that dear, little, old house down at Maywood. I’ve never been back since. I wonder if any one is living in it now. And if Ad am-and-Eve and the Rooster Pine and the Praying Tree are just the same. And who is sleeping in my old room there, and if any one is loving thelittle birches and playing with the Wind Woman in the spruce barrens. Just as I wrote the words ‘spruce barrens’ an old memory came back to me. One spring evening, when I was eight years old, I was running about the barrens playing hide-and-seek with the Wind Woman, and I found a little hollow between two spruces that was just carpeted with tiny, bright-green leaves, when everything else was still brown and faded. They were so beautiful that
the flash
came as I looked at them – it was the very first time it ever came to me. I suppose that is why I remember those little green leaves so distinctly. No one else remembers them – perhaps no one else ever saw them. I have forgotten other leaves, but I remember them every spring and with each remembrance I feel again the wonder-moment they gave me.”

IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT
    S ome of us can recall the exact time in which we reached certain milestones on life’s road – the wonderful hour when we passed from childhood to girlhood – the enchanted, beautiful – or perhaps the shattering and horrible – hour when girlhood was suddenly womanhood – the chilling hour when we faced the fact that youth was definitely behind us – the peaceful, sorrowful hour of the realisation of age. Emily Starr never forgot the night when she passed the first milestone, and left childhood behind her for ever.
    Every experience enriches life and the deeper such an experience, the greater the richness it brings. That night of horror and mystery and strange delight ripened her mind and heart like the passage of years.
    It was a night early in July. The day had been one of intense heat. Aunt Elizabeth had suffered so much from it that she decided she would not go to prayer-meeting. Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy and Emily went. Before leaving Emily asked and obtained Aunt Elizabeth’s permission to go home with Ilse Burnley after meeting, and spend the night. This wasa rare treat. Aunt Elizabeth did not approve of all-night absences as a general thing.
    But Dr. Burnley had to be away, and his housekeeper was temporarily laid up with a broken ankle. Ilse had asked Emily to come over for the night, and Emily was to be permitted to go. Ilse did not know this – hardly hoped for it, in fact – but was to be informed at prayer-meeting. If Ilse had not been late Emily would have told her before meeting “went in,” and the mischances of the night would probably have been averted; but Ilse, as usual,
was
late, and everything else followed in course.
    Emily sat in the Murray pew, near the top of the church by the window that looked out into the grove of fir and maple that surrounded the little white church. This prayer-meeting was not the ordinary weekly sprinkling of a faithful few. It was a “special meeting,” held in view of the approaching