Page:Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery.pdf/161

 ox could have been comfortably stewed in it. Emily thought it must have come down from the days of fairy tales and been some giant’s porridge pot; but Cousin Jimmy told her that it was only a hundred years old and old Hugh Murray had had it sent out from England.

“We’ve used it ever since to boil the potatoes for the New Moon pigs,” he said. “Blair Water folks think it old-fashioned; they’ve all got boiler-houses now, with built-in boilers; but as long as Elizabeth’s boss at New Moon we’ll use this.”

Emily was sure no built-in boiler could have the charm of the big pot. She helped Cousin JimmieJimmy [sic] fill it full of potatoes after she came from school; then, when supper was over, Cousin Jimmy lighted the fire under it and puttered about it all the evening. Sometimes he poked the fire—Emily loved that part of the performance—sending glorious streams of rosy sparks upward into the darkness; sometimes he stirred the potatoes with a long pole, looking, with his queer, forked grey beard and belted “jumper,” just like some old gnome or troll of northland story mixing the contents of a magical caldron; and sometimes he sat beside Emily on the grey granite boulder near the pot and recited his poetry for her. Emily liked this best of all, for Cousin Jimmy’s poetry was surprisingly good—at least in spots—and Cousin Jimmy had “fit audience though few” in this slender little maiden with her pale eager face and rapt eyes.

They were an odd couple and they were perfectly happy together. Blair Water people thought Cousin Jimmy a failure and a mental weakling. But he dwelt in an ideal world of which none of them knew anything. He had recited his poems a hundred times thus, as he boiled the pigs’ potatoes; the ghosts of a score of autumns haunted the clump of spruces for him. He was an odd, ridiculous figure enough, bent and wrinkled and unkempt, gesticulating awkwardly as he recited. But it was his hour; he was no longer “simple Jimmy Murray”