Page:Emily Climbs.pdf/34

 live in Charlottetown, were in the Post Office when I was there. Mrs. Sawyer is very handsome and fashionable and condescending. I heard her say to her husband, ‘ do the natives of this sleepy place continue to live here year in and year out? should go mad. ever happens here.’

“I would dearly have liked to tell her a few things about Blair Water. I could have been sarcastic with a vengeance. But, of course, New Moon people. So I contented myself with bowing very coldly when she spoke to me and her. I heard Mr. Sawyer say, ‘Who is that girl?’ and Mrs. Sawyer said, ‘She must be that Starr puss—she has the Murray trick of holding her head, all right.’

“The idea of saying ‘nothing ever happens here’! Why, things are happening right along— things. I think life here is extremely wonderful. We have always so much to laugh and cry and talk about.

“Look at all the things that have happened in Blair Water in just the last three weeks—comedy and tragedy all mixed up together. James Baxter has suddenly stopped speaking to his wife and. doesn’t, poor soul, and she is breaking her heart about it. Old Adam Gillian, who hated pretence of any sort, died two weeks ago and his last words were, ‘See that there isn’t any howling and sniffling at my funeral.’ So nobody howled or sniffled. Nobody wanted to, and since he had forbidden it nobody pretended to. There never was such a cheerful funeral in Blair Water. I’ve seen weddings that were more melancholy—Ella Brice’s, for instance. What cast a cloud over hers was that she forgot to put on her white slippers when she dressed, and went down to the parlor in a pair of old, faded, bedroom shoes with holes in the toes. Really, people couldn’t have talked more about it if she had gone down without on. Poor Ella cried all through the wedding supper about it.

“Qld Robert Scobie and his half-sister have quarrelled,