Page:Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920).djvu/14

vi keeps up to concert-pitch in her charm and her winsomeness. There is nothing in her to disappoint hope or imagination.

Part of the power of Miss Montgomery — and the largest part — is due to her skill in compounding humor and pathos. The humor is honest and golden; it never wearies the reader; the pathos is never sentimentalized, never degenerates into bathos, is never morbid. This combination holds throughout all her works, longer or shorter, and is particularly manifest in the present collection of fifteen short stories, which, together with those in the first volume of the Chronicles of Avonlea, present a series of piquant and fascinating pictures of life in Prince Edward Island.

The humor is shown not only in the presentation of quaint and unique characters, but also in the words which fall from their mouths. Aunt Cynthia “always gave you the impression of a fullrigged ship coming gallantly on before a favorable wind;” no further description is needed — only one such personage could be found in Avonlea. You would recognize her at sight. Ismay Meade’s disposition is summed up when we are told that she is “good at having presentiments — after things happen.” What cleverer embodiment of innate obstinacy than in Isabella Spencer — “a wisp of a woman who looked as if a breath would sway her but was so set in her ways that a tornado would hardly have caused her to swerve an inch from