Emily of New Moon: Chapters 1–5

...Adam-and-Eve, they always called those spruces, because of a whimsical resemblance Emily had traced between their position, with reference to a small apple-tree between them, and that of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge in an old-fashioned picture in one of Ellen Greene’s books.

She had not half the fascination of that solitary, intrepid figure who faced all alone the shadows of the Dark Valley and the encounter with Apollyon.

She was a redoubtable fighter, and strange cats were vanquished in one round.

The fearless little spitfire would even attack dogs and rout them utterly.

“Why can’t I?” Emily asked rather indignantly. Why must she be debarred from “monkeying with colds” if other children could?

“Why can’t I?” Emily asked rather indignantly. Why must she be debarred from “monkeying with colds” if other children could?

The old, mossy, gnarled half-dead spruce-tree, under which she paused for a moment to look up into the sky, was a marble column in a palace of the gods; the far dusky hills were the ramparts of a city of wonder.

It had come with a high, wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field, with a greybird lighting on her window-sill in a storm, with the singing of “Holy, holy, holy” in church, with a glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark autumn night, with the spirit-like blue of ice palms on a twilit pane, with a felicitous new word when she was writing down a “description” of something.

She scuttled back to the house in the hollow, through the gathering twilight, all agog to get home and write down her “description” before the memory picture of what she had seen grew a little blurred.

Ellen looked down gloomily into the rapt little face, where excitement had kindled a faint wild-rose flush, and said, with a ponderous sigh:
“Do you know that your pa has only a week or two more to live?”

They would have liked to take her back to the old Murray burying-ground in Blair Water—they had their own private burying-ground, you know—no indiscriminate graveyard for them.

She was pale and quiet and docile.

“I’ll give you a quarter for a kiss,” he whispered genially.

“I don’t sell my kisses,” she said, lifting her head as haughtily as any Murray of them all could do.

“You are a very ill-bred child,” she said; “but of course it was only what was to be expected.”
Emily felt a sudden compunction.

He gave Emily a hearty handshake, though he looked askance at the lady across from him while doing it.

And Aunt Elizabeth was quite fine looking in a tall, thin, austere style, with clear-cut features and a massive coronet of iron-grey hair under her black lace cap.

Under her cool, appraising glance Emily retreated into herself and shut the door of her soul.

Though Elizabeth Murray would never have admitted it, she did not want to be snubbed as Wallace and Ruth had been.

Emily sat on the sofa with her eyes cast down, a slight, black, indomitable little figure.

She lifted her head and looked about her undauntedly—"brazenly" Aunt Ruth afterwards declared.

Apparently nobody could think of anything to say, but the shocked silence was broken by a chuckle from Cousin Jimmy—a low chuckle, full of mirth and free from malice.

Her aunts and uncles filed out stiffly without looking at her—all except Aunt Laura, who turned at the door and blew her a tiny, furtive kiss.

Raising her head she looked long and earnestly at the beloved face.

At the door she almost fell over Cousin Jimmy, who was sitting on a chair before it, swathed in a huge, checked dressing-gown, and nursing Mike.

The coffin was taken into the parlour and the Murrays as mourners sat stiffly and decorously all round it, Emily among them, pale and prim in her black dress.

The Maywood people came and looked at his dead face with a freedom and insolent curiosity they would never have presumed on in life.

“I won’t—I won’t!” exclaimed Emily—at least she thought it with such vim that it almost seemed that she exclaimed it.

The bravado all went out of poor Emily.

She said it sorrowfully, desiring to make a clean breast of her transgressions; but so easily do we misunderstand each other that the Murrays actually thought that she was indulging in a piece of gratuitous impertinence.

She said it sorrowfully, desiring to make a clean breast of her transgressions; but so easily do we misunderstand each other that the Murrays actually thought that she was indulging in a piece of gratuitous impertinence.

She said it sorrowfully, desiring to make a clean breast of her transgressions; but so easily do we misunderstand each other that the Murrays actually thought that she was indulging in a piece of gratuitous impertinence.

She had finished; she had written a description of the whole occurrence and of that conclave ring of Murrays, and she had wound up by a pathetic description of her own deathbed, with the Murrays standing around imploring her forgiveness.

They were all there—the whole phalanx of them—and it occurred to Emily as she looked at Uncle Wallace, sitting in the spring sunshine, that she had not just found the exact word after all to express his peculiar quality of grimness.

“You may take one of your cats,” she said at last, with the air of a person making a great concession.

She watched the leaves shrivel and shudder, as if they were sentient things, and then turn black.

Emily glanced apprehensively over her shoulder.

...Emily said good-bye to everything—to the Rooster Pine and Adam-and-Eve—“they’ll miss me so when I’m gone; there won’t be any one here to love them,” she said wistfully—to the spider crack in the kitchen window—to the old wing-chair—to the bed of striped grass—to the silver birch-ladies.

It was such a wonderful dress—all white lace and wreaths of rosebuds, with a long, long, train of lace flounces that must reach clear across a room.

Cousin Jimmy and Aunt Elizabeth sat in front, the latter very imposing in black lace bonnet and mantle.