Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

Chapter 15

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straight through Mr. Bell’s woods. J8 It was fringed in all its length with slim young birches, white-stemmed and lissome-boughed; ferns and starflowers and wild lilies-of-the-valley and scarlet tufts of pigeon-berries grew thickly along it. And always there was a delightful spiciness in the air and music of bird calls and the murmur and laugh of wood winds in the trees overhead. Now and then you might see a rabbit skipping across the road if you were quiet. (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)K8(end superscript) Down in the valley the path came out to the main road and then it was just up the spruce hill to the school.

The Avonlea school was a white-washed building low in the

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note J8
Where the light came down sifted through so many emerald screens that it was as flawless as the heart of a diamond.

LMM Note K8
—which, with Anne and Diana, happened about once in a blue moon.


PHOTO ANNOTATION

a small white school house with tall windows sits in a clearing of the woods

"Avonlea School": Montgomery's photograph of the one-room Cavendish school, a model for the Avonlea school.
Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph, L.M. Montgomery Collection

AUDIO ANNOTATION

REFERENCE
 "school": Jennie Macneill, co-owner with the late John Macneill (grandson of John Franklin Macneill) of the Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Cavendish Home, attended and taught in one-room P.E.I. schools.

I didn't go to anything else but a one-room school for ten grades, like grades one to ten, in a one-room school. And uh, the schools didn't change very much for many years in the late 1800s right up until almost consolidation, which came in the late [Nineteen] sixties. The little one-room schools: they had the pot-bellied stove, blackboards, desks nailed to the floor. The first school I taught in, there were thirty-seven pupils in grades one to ten, three to a seat, in these seats which were nailed to the floor. Um. An outdoor toilet. The pot-bellied stove of course but, but somehow or other the children had great respect for a teacher.