quarts of tears while writing it, and the other girls shed gallons while I read it.
Jane Andrews’ mother scolded her frightfully because she had so many
handkerchiefs in the wash that week. It’s a harrowing tale of the wanderings of a
Methodist minister’s wife. I made her a Methodist because it was necessary that
she should wander. She buried a child every place she lived in. There were nine
of them and their graves were severed far apart, ranging from Newfoundland to
Vancouver. I described the children, pictured their several death beds, and
detailed their tombstones and epitaphs. I had intended to bury the whole nine but
when I had disposed of eight my invention of horrors gave out and I permitted
the ninth to live as a hopeless cripple.”
While Stella read My Graves, punctuating its tragic paragraphs with chuckles,
and Rusty slept the sleep of a just cat who has been out all night curled up on a
Jane Andrews tale of a beautiful maiden of fifteen who went to nurse in a leper
colony—of course dying of the loathsome disease finally—Anne glanced over
the other manuscripts and recalled the old days at Avonlea school when the
members of the Story Club, sitting under the spruce trees or down among the
ferns by the brook, had written them. What fun they had had! How the sunshine
and mirth of those olden summers returned as she read. Not all the glory that was
Greece or the grandeur that was Rome could weave such wizardry as those
funny, tearful tales of the Story Club. Among the manuscripts Anne found one
written on sheets of wrapping paper. A wave of laughter filled her gray eyes as
she recalled the time and place of its genesis. It was the sketch she had written
the day she fell through the roof of the Cobb duckhouse on the Tory Road.
Anne glanced over it, then fell to reading it intently. It was a little dialogue
between asters and sweet-peas, wild canaries in the lilac bush, and the guardian
spirit of the garden. After she had read it, she sat, staring into space; and when
Stella had gone she smoothed out the crumpled manuscript.
“I believe I will,” she said resolutely.