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 8

124

and that if I only knew the spell I could open the door and step right into the room where Katie Maurice lived, instead of into Mrs. Thomas’ shelves of preserves and china. And then Katie Maurice would have taken me by the hand and led me out into a wonderful place, all flowers and sunshine and fairies, and we would have lived there happy for ever after. When I went to live with Mrs. Hammond it just broke my heart to leave Katie Maurice. She felt it dreadfully, too, I know she did, for she was crying when she kissed me good-bye through the book-case door. There was no book-case at Mrs. Hammond’s. But just up the river there a little way from the house there was a (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)long, green(end superscript) valley, and the loveliest echo lived there. It echoed back every word you said,


TEXT ANNOTATION

"the loveliest echo lived there.": Montgomery used, and personified, echoes often. In Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne meets Miss Lavendar, who lives at Echo Lodge, where "Back came the echoes, as if a host of pixy people were mimicking her laughter in the purple woodlands and along the fir-fringed points."