Sometimes the boys went digging "cow-hawks" with Captain Malachi when the mysterious "tides" permitted ... tides that came in to caress the land but slipped back to their own deep sea. There was a reek of leaf fires all through the Glen, a heap of big yellow pumpkins in the barn, and Susan made the first cranberry pies.
Ingleside rang with laughter from dawn to sunset. Even when the older children were in school Shirley and Rilla were big enough now to keep up the tradition of laughter. Even Gilbert laughed more than usual this fall. "I like a dad who can laugh," Jem reflected.
Dr. Bronson of Mowbray Narrows never laughed. He was said to have built up his practice entirely on his owlish look of wisdom; but Dad had a better practice still and people were pretty far gone when they couldn't laugh over one of his jokes.
Anne was busy in her garden every warm day, drinking in colour like wine, where the late sunshine fell on crimson maples, revelling in the exquisite sadness of fleeting beauty. One gold-grey smoky afternoon she and Jem planted all the tulip bulbs, that would have a resurrection of rose and scarlet and purple and gold in June.
"Isn't it nice to be preparing for spring when you know you've got to face winter, Jem?" "And it's nice to be making the garden beautiful," said Jem. "Susan says it is God who makes everything beautiful but we can help Him out a bit, can't we, Mums?”
"Always ... always, Jem. He shares that privilege with us.”
Still, nothing is ever quite perfect. The Ingleside folks were worried over Cock Robin. They had been told that when the robins went away he would want to go too.
"Keep him shut up till all the rest are gone and the snow comes,” advised Captain Malachi. "Then he'll kind of forget about it and be all right till spring.”
So Cock Robin was a sort of prisoner. He grew very restless. He flew aimlessly about the house or sat on the window-sill and looked wistfully out at his fellows who were preparing to follow who knew what mysterious call. His appetite failed and even worms and Susan's nuttiest nuts would not tempt him. The children pointed out to him all the dangers he might encounter ... cold, hunger, friendlessness, storms, black nights, cats. But Cock Robin had felt or heard the summons and all his being yearned to answer.
Susan was the last to give in. She was very grim for several days.
But finally, "Let him go," she said. "It is against nature to hold him.”
They set him free the last day of October, after he had been mewed up for a month. The children kissed him good-bye with tears. He flew joyfully off, returning next morning to Susan's sill for crumbs and then spreading his wings for the long flight. "He may come back to us in the spring, darling," Anne said to the sobbing Rilla. But Rilla was not to be comforted.
"That ith too far away," she sobbed.
Anne smiled and sighed. The seasons that seemed so long to Baby Rilla were beginning to pass all too quickly for her. Another summer was ended, lighted out of life by the ageless gold of Lombardy torches. Soon ... all too soon ... the children of Ingleside would be children no longer. But they were still hers ... hers to welcome when they came home at night ... hers to fill life with wonder and delight ... hers to love and cheer and scold ... a little. For sometimes they were very naughty, even though they hardly deserved to be called by Mrs. Alec Davies "that pack of Ingleside demons" when she heard that Bertie Shakespeare Drew had been slightly scorched while playing the part of a Red Indian burned at the stake in Rainbow Valley. It had taken Jem and Walter a little longer to untie him than they had bargained for.
They got slightly singed, too, but nobody pitied THEM.
November was a dismal month that year ... a month of east wind and fog. Some days there was nothing but cold mist driving past or drifting over the grey sea beyond the bar. The shivering poplar trees dropped their last leaves. The garden was dead and all its colour and personality had gone from it ... except the asparagus- bed, which was still a fascinating golden jungle. Walter had to desert his study roost in the maple tree and learn his lessons in the house. It rained ... and rained ... and rained. "Will the world EVER be dry again?" moaned Di despairingly. Then there was a week steeped in the magic of Indian summer sunshine, and in the cold sharp evenings Mother would touch a match to the kindling in the grate and Susan would have baked potatoes with supper.
The big fireplace was the centre of the home those evenings. It was the high spot of the day when they gathered around it after supper. Anne sewed and planned little winter wardrobes ... "Nan must have a red dress, since she is so set on it" ... and sometimes thought of Hannah, weaving her little coat every year for the small Samuel. Mothers were the same all through the centuries ... a great sisterhood of love and service ... the remembered and the unremembered alike.
Susan heard the children's spellings and then they amused themselves as they liked. Walter, living in his world of imagination and beautiful dreams, was absorbed in writing a series of letters from the chipmunk who lived in Rainbow Valley to the chipmunk who lived behind the barn. Susan pretended to scoff at them when he read them to her, but she secretly made copies of them and sent them to Rebecca Dew.
"I found these readable, Miss Dew dear, though you may consider them too trivial to peruse. In that case I know you will pardon a DOTING OLD WOMAN for troubling you with them. He is considered very clever in school and at least these compositions are not poetry. I might also add that Little Jem made NINETY-NINE in his arithmetic examination last week and nobody can understand why the other mark was cut off. Perhaps I should not say so, Miss Dew dear, but it is my conviction that that child is BORN FOR GREATNESS. We may not live to see it but he may yet be Premier of Canada.”
The Shrimp basked in the glow and Nan's kitten, Pussywillow, which always suggested some dainty exquisite little lady in black and silver, climbed everybody's legs impartially. "Two cats, and mouse tracks everywhere in the pantry," was Susan's disapproving parenthesis. The children talked over their little adventures together and the wail of the distant ocean came through the cold autumn night.
Sometimes Miss Cornelia dropped in for a short call while her husband exchanged opinions in Carter Flagg's store. Little pitchers pricked up their long ears then, for Miss Cornelia always had the latest gossip and they always heard the most interesting things about people. It would be such fun next Sunday to sit in church and look at the said people, savouring what you knew about them, prim and proper as they looked.
"My, but you're cosy here, Anne dearie. It's a real keen night and starting to snow. Is the doctor out?”
"Yes. I hated to see him go ... but they telephoned from the Harbour Head that Mrs. Brooker Shaw insisted on seeing him," said Anne, while Susan swiftly and stealthily removed from the hearth- rug a huge fishbone the Shrimp had brought in, praying that Miss Cornelia had not noticed it.
"She's no more sick than I am," said Susan bitterly. "But I hear she has got a NEW LACE NIGHTGOWN and no doubt she wants her doctor to see her in it. Lace nightgowns!”
"Her daughter Leona brought it home from Boston for her. She came Friday evening, with FOUR TRUNKS," said Miss Cornelia. "I can remember her starting off to the States nine years ago, lugging a broken old Gladstone bag with things oozing out of it. That was when she was feeling pretty blue over Phil Turner's jilting her.
She tried to hide it but everyone KNEW. Now she's back to 'nurse her mother,' so she says. She'll be trying to flirt with the doctor, I warn you, Anne dearie. But I don't suppose it will matter to him even if he is a man. And you're not like Mrs. Dr.
Bronson at Mowbray Narrows. She is very jealous of her husband's female patients, I am told.”
"AND of the trained nurses," said Susan.
"Well, some of those trained nurses ARE far too pretty for their job," said Miss Cornelia. "There's Janie Arthur now; she's taking a rest between cases and trying to keep her two young men from finding out about each other.”