Free Anne's House of Dreams by Lucy Maud Montgomery Page A

seems odd we’ve never met the Moores yet, when they live within fifteen minutes’ walk of us. I may have seen them in church, of course, but if so I didn’t know them. I’m sorry they are so unsociable, when they are our only near neighbours.’
    ‘Evidently they don’t belong to the race that knows Joseph,’ laughed Gilbert. ‘Have you ever found out who that girl was whom you thought so beautiful?’
    ‘No. Somehow I have never remembered to ask about her. But I’ve never seen her anywhere, so I suppose she must have been a stranger. Oh, the sun has just vanished – and there’s the light.’
    As the dusk deepened, the great beacon cut swathes of light through it, sweeping in a circle over the fields and the harbour, the sand-bar and the gulf.
    ‘I feel as if it might catch me and whisk me leagues out to sea,’ said Anne, as one drenched them with radiance; and she felt rather relieved when they got so near the Point that they were inside the range of those dazzling, recurrent flashes.
    As they turned into the little lane that led across the fields to the Point they met a man coming out of it – a man of such extraordinary appearance that for a moment they both frankly stared. He was a decidedly fine-looking person – tall, broad-shouldered, well featured, with a Roman nose and frank grey eyes; he was dressed in a prosperous farmer’s Sunday best; in so far he might have been any inhabitant of Four Winds or the Glen. But flowing over his breast nearly to his knees was a river of crinkly brown beard; and adown his back, beneath his commonplace felt hat, was a corresponding cascade of thick, wavy brown hair.
    ‘Anne,’ murmured Gilbert, when they were out of earshot, ‘you didn’t put what Uncle Dave calls “a little of the Scott Act” in that lemonade you gave me just before we left home, did you?’
    ‘No, I didn’t,’ said Anne, stifling her laughter, lest the retreating enigma should hear her. ‘Who in the world can he be?’
    ‘I don’t know; but if Captain Jim keeps apparitions like that down at this Point I’m going to carry cold iron in my pocket when I come here. He wasn’t a sailor, or one might pardon his eccentricity of appearance; he must belong to the over-harbour clans. Uncle Dave says they have several freaks over there.’
    ‘Uncle Dave is a little prejudiced, I think. You know all the over-harbour people who come to the Glen Church seem very nice. Oh, Gilbert, isn’t this beautiful?’
    The Four Winds light was built on a spur of red sandstone cliff jutting out into the gulf. On one side, across the channel, stretched the silvery sand shore of the bar; on the other extended a long, curving beach of red cliffs, rising steeply from the pebbled coves. It was a shore that knew the magic and mystery of storm and star. There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary – they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery – we may only wander, awed and spellbound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only – a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels.
    Anne and Gilbert found Captain Jim sitting on a bench outside the lighthouse, putting the finishing touches to a wonderful, full-rigged toy schooner. He rose and welcomed them to his abode with the gentle, unconscious courtesy that became him so well.
    ‘This has been a purty nice day all through, Mistress Blythe, and now, right at the last, it’s brought its best. Would you like to sit down here outside a bit, while the light lasts? I’ve just finished this bit of a plaything for my little grand-nephew, Joe, up at the Glen. After I promised to make it for him I was kinder sorry, for his mother