Emily of New Moon

Emily Byrd Starr lived with her father in a little house in a hollow at Maywood, with young fir trees crowding close about it.It stood far from other houses, and Emily had never been to school; her father had taught her himself.Her mother had died when Emily was a baby, and her mother’s people, the proud Murrays of New Moon Farm, had never forgiven the marriage and never came.

Emily was a strange, watchful child who loved words and made up poems in her head as she walked.Sometimes there came to her what she called “the flash” — a sudden moment when a curtain seemed to lift and she saw, just for a heartbeat, a world far lovelier than her own.She had names for the things she loved: the Wind Woman who moved in the trees, and two friendly birches she called Adam-and-Eve.

Her father had been ill all winter with a cough that would not leave him, and lately he had spent long hours resting on the sofa.Emily knew that he had grown thin, and that visitors lowered their voices in the kitchen, but no one had told her anything.One grey afternoon her father walked slowly up the road to see a neighbour, and Emily was left in the kitchen with Ellen Greene, the stout old woman who kept house for them.

Ellen looked at the child over her knitting and said, in the flat voice of someone passing on plain news, “You’ll have to be a good girl now, Emily, and not worry your poor father.”“Because,” Ellen went on, “he isn’t going to be with you very long now. The doctor says he can’t last out the spring.”For a moment Emily did not understand. Then the words came together, and something cold and huge seemed to fall on her.“It isn’t true,” she said, in a sharp little voice. “It can’t be true. Father is getting better.”

Ellen only shook her head and went on knitting, and Emily could not stay in the room with her a moment longer.She ran out and down the road in the raw wind, past Adam-and-Eve, until she met her father walking slowly home.She took hold of his hand and asked him, straight out, whether what Ellen had said was true.

He did not tell her a kind lie. He drew her close and said, gently, that it was true, and that he was sorry to have to leave her so soon.“But you must not be afraid,” he told her. “Nothing that is really worth keeping can ever be lost.”“And some day you will write about all of this, Emily. I have always known that you would.”