* * *
Then there was a missionary book dealing with the Pacific Islands, in which I revelled because it was full of pictures of cannibal chiefs with the most extraordinary hair arrangements. Hans Andersen’s Tales were a perennial joy. I always loved fairy tales and delighted in ghost stories. Indeed, to this day I like nothing better than a well-told ghost story, warranted to send a cold creep down your spine. But it must be a real ghost story, mark you. The spook must not turn out a delusion and a snare.
* * *
I did not have access to many novels. Those were the days when novels were frowned on as reading for children. The only novels in the house were Rob Roy, Pickwick Papers, and Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni; and I pored over them until I knew whole chapters by heart.
Fortunately poetry did not share the ban of novels. I could revel at will in Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier, Scott, Byron, Milton, Burns. Poetry pored over in childhood becomes part of one’s nature more thoroughly than that which if first read in mature years can ever do. Its music was woven into my growing soul and has echoed through it, consciously and subconsciously, ever since: “the music of the immortals, of those great, beautiful souls whose passing tread has made of earth holy ground.”
But even poetry was barred on Sundays. Then our faithful standbys were Pilgrim’s Progress and Talmage’s Sermons. Pilgrim’s Progress was read and re-read with never-failing delight. I am proud of this; but I am not quite so proud of the fact that I found just as much delight in reading Talmage’s Sermons. That was Talmage’s palmy day. All the travelling colporteurs carried his books, and a new volume of Talmage’s meant then to us pretty much what a “best-seller” does now. I cannot claim that it was the religion that attracted me, though at that age I liked the Talmage brand much; it was the anecdotes and the vivid, dramatic word-pictures. His sermons were as interesting as fiction. I am sure I couldn’t read them with any patience now; but I owe Talmage a very real debt of thanks for pleasure given to a child craving the vividness of life.
My favourite Sunday book, however, was a thin little volume entitled The Memoir of Anzonetta Peters. I shall never forget that book. It belonged to a type now vanished from the earth—fortunately—but much in vogue at that time. It was the biography of a child who at five years became converted, grew very ill soon afterward, lived a marvellously patient and saintly life for several years, and died, after great sufferings, at the age of ten.
I must have read that book a hundred times if I did once. I don’t think it had a good effect on me. For one thing it discouraged me horribly. Anzonetta was so hopelessly perfect that I felt it was no use to try to imitate her. Yet I did try. She never seemed by any chance to use the ordinary language of childhood at all. She invariably responded to any remark, if it were only “How are you to-day, Anzonetta?” by quoting a verse of scripture or a hymn stanza. Anzonetta was a perfect hymnal. She died to a hymn, her last, faintly-whispered utterance being
“Hark, they whisper, angels say,
Sister spirit, come away.”
I dared not attempt to use verses and hymns in current conversation. I had a wholesome conviction that I should be laughed at, and moreover, I doubted being understood. But I did my best; I wrote hymn after hymn in my little diary, and patterned the style of my entries after Anzonetta’s remarks. For example, I remember writing gravely “I wish I were in Heaven now, with Mother and George Whitefield and Anzonetta B. Peters.”
But I didn’t really wish it. I only thought I ought to. I was, in reality, very well contented with my own world, and my own little life full of cabbages and kings.
VI
I have written at length about the incidents and environment of my childhood because they had a marked influence on the development of my literary gift. A different environment would have given it a different bias. Were it not for those Cavendish years, I do not think Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written.
When I am asked “When did you begin to write?” I say, “I wish I could remember.” I cannot remember the time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author. To write has always been my central purpose around which every effort and hope and ambition of my life has grouped itself. I was an indefatigable little scribbler, and stacks of manuscripts, long ago reduced to ashes, alas, bore testimony to the same. I wrote about all the little incidents of my existence. I wrote descriptions of my favourite haunts, biographies of my many cats, histories of visits, and school affairs, and even critical reviews of the books I had read.
One wonderful day, when I was nine years old, I discovered that I could write poetry. I had been reading Thomson’s Seasons, of which a little black, curly-covered atrociously printed copy had fallen into my hands. So I composed a “poem” called “Autumn” in blank verse in imitation thereof. I wrote it, I remember, on the back of one of the long red “letter bills” then used in the postal service. It was seldom easy for me to get all the paper I wanted, and those blessed old letter bills were positive boons. Grandfather kept the post office, and three times a week a discarded “letter bill” came my grateful way. The Government was not so economical then as now, at least in the matter of letter bills; they were then half a yard long.
As for “Autumn,” I remember only the opening lines:
“Now autumn comes, laden with peach and pear;
The sportsman’s horn is heard throughout the land,
And the poor partridge, fluttering, falls dead.”
True, peaches and pears were not abundant in Prince Edward Island at any season, and I am sure nobody ever heard a “sportsman’s horn” in that Province, though there really was some partridge shooting. But in those glorious days my imagination refused to be hampered by facts. Thomson had sportsman’s horns and so forth; therefore I must have them too.
Father came to see me the very day I wrote it, and I proudly read it to him. He remarked unenthusiastically that “it didn’t sound much like poetry.” This squelched me for a time; but if the love of writing is bred in your bones, you will be practically non-squelchable. Once I had found out that I could write poetry I overflowed into verse over everything. I wrote in rhyme after that, though, having concluded that it was because “Autumn” did not rhyme that Father thought it wasn’t poetry. I wrote yards of verses about flowers and months and trees and stars and sunsets, and I addressed “Lives” to my friends.
A school chum of mine, Alma M——, had also a knack of writing rhyme. She and I had a habit, no doubt, a reprehensible one, of getting out together on the old side bench at school, and writing “po’try” on our slates, when the master fondly supposed we were sharpening our intellects on fractions.
* * *
We began by first writing acrostics on our names; then we wrote poems addressed to each other in which we praised each other fulsomely; finally, one day, we agreed to write up in stirring rhyme all our teachers, including the master himself. We filled our slates; two verses were devoted to each