Join Host Bree Carlile as she reads the thirty-first chapter of Anne of the Island by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
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Chapter my chapter won't fight so many adventures and mountains we can't climb.
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Welcome to Bite at a Time books where we read you your favorite classics one byte at a time.
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My name is Brie Carlyle, and I love to read and wanted to share my passion with listeners like you.
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Today we'll be continuing Anne of the island by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
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Chapter 31 anne to Philippa anne Shirley to Philippa Gordon greeting, well beloved.
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It's high time I was writing you.
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Here I am installed once more as a country schoolman at Valley Road, boarding at Wayside, the home of Miss Janet suite.
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Janet is a dear soul and very nice looking.
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Tall, but not overtall stoutish, yet with a certain restraint of outline suggestive of a thrifty soul who's not going to be over lavish even in the matter of oriboduous.
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She has a knot of soft, crimpy brown hair with a thread of gray in it, a sunny face with rosy cheeks, and big, kind eyes as blue as Forgetmenots.
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Moreover, she's one of those delightful oldfashioned cooks who don't care a bit if they ruin your digestion, as long as they can give you feasts of fat things.
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I like her, and she likes me, principally, it seems, because she had a sister named Anne who died young.
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I'm real glad to see you, she said briskly when I landed in her yard.
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My, you don't look a mite like I expected.
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I was sure you'd be dark.
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My sister Anne was dark, and here you're redheaded.
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For a few minutes I thought I wasn't going to like Janet as much as I had expected at first sight.
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Then I reminded myself that I really must be more sensible than to be prejudiced against anyone simply because she called my hair red.
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Probably the word auburn was not in Janet's vocabulary at all.
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Wayside is a dear sort of spot.
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The house is small and white, set down in a delightful little hollow that drops away from the road.
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Between road and house is an orchard and flower garden, all mixed up together.
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The front doorwalk is bordered with quagog, clamshells cow hawks, Janet calls them.
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There's Virginia creeper over the porch and moss on the roof.
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My room is a neat little spot off the parlor, just big enough for the bed and me.
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Over the head of my bed there's a picture of Robbie Burns standing at Highland Mary's grave, shadowed by an enormous weeping willow tree.
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Robbie's face is so lugorbrous that it is no wonder I have bad dreams.
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Why, the first night I was here, I dreamed I couldn't laugh.
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The parlour is tiny and neat.
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It's one window is so shaded by a huge willow that the room has a grotto like effect of emerald gloom.
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There are wonderful tidies on the chairs and gay mats on the floor and books and cards carefully arranged on a round table and vases of dried grass.
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On the mantelpiece between the vases the cheerful decoration of preserved coffin plates five and all pertaining respectively to Janet's father and mother, a brother, her sister Anne, and a hired man who died here once.
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If I go suddenly insane some of these days, know all men by these presents that those coffin plates have caused it.
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But it's all delightful, and I said so.
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Janet loved me for it, just as she detested poor Esther because Esther had said so much shade was unhygienic and had objected to sleeping on a featherbed.
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Now Iglorian feather beds, and the more unhygienic and feathery they are, the more I glory.
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Janet says it is such a comfort to see me eat.
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She had been so afraid I would be like Miss Haythorne who wouldn't eat anything but fruit and hot water for breakfast and tried to make Janet give up frying things.
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Esther is really a dear girl, but she is rather given to fads.
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The trouble is that she hasn't enough imagination and has a tendency to indigestion.
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Janet told me I could have the use of the parlor when any young men called.
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I don't think there are many to call.
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I haven't seen a young man in Valley Road yet except the nextdoor hired boy, Sam Tolliver, a very tall, lank toehaired youth.
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He came over one evening recently and sat for an hour on the garden fence near the front porch where Janet and I were doing fancy work.
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The only remarks he volunteered in all that time were have a peppermint, Miss Do.
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Now find thing for care of peppermints.
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And powerful lot of jumping grasses around here tonight.
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Yep, but there's a love affair going on here.
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It seems to be my fortune to be mixed up more or less actively with elderly love affairs.
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Mr.
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And Mrs.
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Irving always say that I brought about their marriage.
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Mrs.
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Stephen Clark of Carmody persists in being the most grateful to me for a suggestion which somebody else would probably have made if I hadn't.
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I do really think, though, that Ludovic's speed would never have got any further along than Placid courtship if I had not helped him in Theodora Dicks out.
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In the present affair, I'm only a passive spectator.
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I've tried once to help things along and made an awful mess of it.
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So I shall not meddle again.
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I'll tell you all about it when we meet.
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Thank you for joining Byte at the Time Books today while we read a bite of one of your favorite classics.
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