“Aunt Elizabeth always puts up my school dinner for me. She won’t give me anything but plain bread and butter but she cuts good thick slices and the butter is thick too and never has the horrid taste Ellen Greene’s butter used to have. And Aunt Laura slips in a cooky or an apple turnover when Aunt Elizabeth’s back is turned. Aunt Elizabeth says apple turnovers are not helthy for me. Why is it that the nicest things never are helthy, Father? Ellen Greene used to say that too.
“My teacher’s name is Miss Brownell. I don’t like the cut of her jib. (That is a naughtical frays that Cousin Jimmy uses. I know frays is not spelled right but there is no dixonary at New Moon but that is the sound of it.) She is too sarkastik and she likes to make you rediklus. Then she laughs at you in a disagreable, snorting way. But I forgave her for slapping me and I took a boquet to her to school next day to make up. She receeved it very coldly and let it fade on her desk. In a story she would have wepped on my neck. I don’t know whether it is any use forgiving people or not. Yes, it is, it makes you feel more comfortable yourself. You never had to ware baby aprons and sunbonnets because you were a boy so you can’t understand how I feel about it. And the aprons are made of such good stuff that they will never ware out and it will be years before I grow out of them. But I have a white dress for church with a black silk sash and a white legorn hat with black bows and black kid slippers, and I feel very elegant in them. I wish I could have a bang but Aunt Elizabeth will not hear to it. Rhoda told me I had beautiful eyes. I wish she hadn’t. I have always suspekted my eyes were beautiful but I was not sure. Now that I know they are I’m afraid I’ll always be wondering if people notis it. I have to go to bed at half past eight and I don’t like it but I sit up in bed and look out of the window till it gets dark, so I get square with Aunt Elizabeth that way, and I listen to the sound the sea makes. I like it now though it always makes me feel sorrowful, but it’s a kind of a nice sorrow. I have to sleep with Aunt Elizabeth and I don’t like that either because if I move ever so little she says I figit but she admits that I don’t kick. And she won’t let me put the window up. She doesn’t like fresh air or light in the house. The parlour is dark as a toomb. I went in one day and rolled up all the blinds and Aunt Elizabeth was horrifyed and called me a little hussy and gave me the Murray look. You would suppose I had committed a crime. I felt so insulted that I came up to the garret and wrote a deskription of myself being drowned on a letter-bill and then I felt better. Aunt Elizabeth said I was never to go into the parlour again without permission but I don’t want to. I am afraid of the parlour. All the walls are hung over with pictures of our ancesters and there is not one good-looking person among them except Grandfather Murray who looks handsome but very cross. The spare room is upstairs and is just as gloomy as the parlour. Aunt Elizabeth only lets distingwished people sleep there. I like the kitchen in daytime, and the garret and the cookhouse and the sitting-room and the hall because of the lovely red front door and I love the dairy, but I don’t like the other New Moon rooms. Oh, I forgot the cellar cubbord. I love to go down there and look at the beautiful rows of jam and jelly pots. Cousin Jimmy says it is a New Moon tradishun that the jam pots must never be empty. What a lot of tradishuns New Moon has. It is a very spashus house, and the trees are lovely. I have named the three lombardys at the garden gate the Three Princesses and I have named the old summer house Emily’s Bower, and the big apple tree by the old orchard gate the Praying Tree because it holds up its long boughs exactly as Mr. Dare holds up his arms in church where he prays.
“Aunt Elizabeth has given me the little right hand top burow drawer to keep my things in.
“Oh, Father dear, I have made a great diskoverry. I wish I had made it when you were alive for I think you’d have liked to know. I can write poetry. Perhaps I could have written it long ago if I’d tried. But after that first day in school I felt I was bound in honnour to try and it is so easy. There is a little curly black-covered book in Aunt Elizabeth’s bookcase called Thompson’s Seasons and I decided I would write a poem on a season and the first three lines are,
Now Autumn comes ripe with the peech and pear,
The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,
And the poor partridge fluttering falls dead.
“Of course there are no peeches in P. E. Island and I never heard a sportsman’s horn here either, but you don’t have to stick too close to facts in poetry. I filled a whole letter-bill with it and then I ran and read it to Aunt Laura. I thought she would be overjoyed to find she had a niece who could write poetry but she took it very coolly and said it didn’t sound much like poetry. It’s blank verse I cryed. Very blank said
