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 32 - (VERSO)

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Excuse me a minute, Diana. I must run right out to the field to tell Matthew. Then we’ll go up the road and tell the good news to the others.”

They hurried to the hayfield below the barn where Matthew was coiling hay and, as luck would have it, Mrs. Lynde was talking to Marilla at the lane fence.

“Oh, Matthew,” exclaimed Anne, “I’ve passed and I’m first – or one of the first! I’m not vain but I’m thankful.”

“Well now, I always said it,” said Matthew, gazing at the pass list delightedly. “I knew you could beat them all easy.”

“You’ve done pretty well, I must say, Anne,” said Marilla, trying to hide her extreme pride in Anne from Mrs. Rachel’s critical eye.



PHOTO ANNOTATION

yellow-toned postcard of a hay field, workers are spaced out collecting hay in to cone-shapes, a small farmhouse in the background

"coiling hay": Raking it into cones to protect it from rain. In 1923, when Montgomery was visiting the Island and staying with Alec and May Macneill in Cavendish, they enjoyed together Alec and Pensie's father’s diary from the 1890s. Montgomery copied the whole diary into her journal and then described, on March 1, 1925, her vivid responses to Charles Macneill’s entries. She mentioned that "coiling" hay is unknown in Ontario; there, instead, they make "cocks." "Many a time I have helped ‘coil’ the hay . . . . I remember that Pensie and I coiled a whole field of hay one evening when the men were away and a thunderstorm was brewing." (Macneill and Montgomery, The Diary of Charles Macneill, Farmer, 1892–1896, p. 84.) Pictured here, Montgomery's postcard to George MacMillan from 1906 showing a "Harvest Scene" on P.E.I. with coils of hay in a field.
The George Boyd MacMillan Family Papers in the LMMI's Ryrie-Campbell Collection