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 5

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this shore is nicer than the Marysville shore. Aren’t those gulls splendid. Would you like to be a gull. I think I would Don’t you thin —that is, if I couldn’t be a human girl. Don’t you think it would be nice to wake up at sunrise + swoop down over the water and away out over that lovely blue all day? Oh I can ; and then at night to fly back to one’s nest. Oh, I can just imagine myself doing it. What big house is that just ahead, please?”

“That’s the White Sands Hotel. Mr. Kirk runs it but the season hasn’t begun yet. There are heaps of Americans come there for the summer. They think this shore


PHOTO ANNOTATION

light-colored painting of a two story hotel with many windows

"White Sands Hotel": Montgomery's invention may have been inspired by the Seaside Hotel in Rustico Beach, which catered to tourists (including many Americans); it opened in 1875 and burned down in 1902. Its most famous guests included, in 1879, the Governor General, the Marquis of Lorne, and his wife Princess Louise, daughter of Queen Victoria. Painting by William Critchlow Harris, Seaside Hotel, Rustico, P.E.I., year unknown, watercolour on paper, Gift of Robert Harris Trust, 1965, CAGH-185
Collection of Confederation Centre Art Gallery