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Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main
road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders
and ladies' eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its
source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place;
it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its
earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of
pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde's
Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not
even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door
without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably
was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window,
keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks
and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or
out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted
out the whys and wherefores thereof.
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Isaac McCaslin, 'Uncle Ike', past seventy and nearer eighty than he ever corroborated any
more, a widower now and uncle to half a county and father to no one ---- this was not something
participated in or even seen by himself, but by his elder cousin, McCaslin Edmonds, grandson of
Isaac's father's sister and so descended by the distaff, yet not withstanding the inheritor, and
in his time the bequestor, of that which some had thought then and some still thought should
have been Isaac's, since his was the name in which the title to the land had first been granted
from the Indian patent and which some of the descendants of his father's slave still bore in
the land.
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I, Daniel Quinn, neither the first nor the last of a line of such Quinn's, set eyes on Maud the
wondrous on a late December day in 1849 on the banks of the river of the aristocrats and paupers,
just as the great courtesan Magdalena Colón, also known as La Última, a woman
whose presence turned men into spittling, masturbating pigs, boarded a skiff to carry her
across the river's icy water from Albany to Greenbush, her first stop en route to the city of
Troy, a community of iron, where later that evening she was scheduled to enact, yet again, her
role as the lascivious Lais, that fabled prostitute who spurned Demosthenes' gold and yielded
free to Diogenes, the virtuous, impecunious tub-dweller.
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Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Sommersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement,
never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and
consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect,
by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations,
arising from domestic affairs, changed naturally into pity and contempt, as he turned over the
almost endless creations of the last century - and there, if every other leaf were powerless,
he could read his own history with an interest that never failed - this was the page at which the
favourite volume always opened:
ELLIOT OF KELLYNCH HALLWalter Elliot,
born March 1, 1760, married, July 15, 1784, Elizabeth, daughter of James Stevenson, Esq. of South
Park, in the county of Gloucester; by which lady (who died 1800) he has issue Elizabeth, born June 1, 1785;
Anne, born August 9, 1787; a stillborn son, Nov. 5, 1789; Mary, born Nov. 20, 1791.
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In the last years of the seventeenth century there was to be found among the fops and fools
of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more
ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly,
all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of
Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than
applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and
ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and
Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and sting-taut with similes stretched to the
snapping point.
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It was many years ago in that dark, chaotic, unfathomable pool of time before Germaine's
birth (nearly twelve months before her birth), on a night in late September stirred by innumerable
frenzied winds, like spirits contending with one another - mow plaintively, now angrily,
now with a subtle cellolike delicacy capable of making the flesh rise on one's arms and
neck - a night so sulfurous, so restless, so swollen with inarticulate longing that
Leah and Gideon Bellefleur in their enormous bed quarreled once again, brought to tears
because their love was too ravenous to be contained by their mere mortal bodies; and
their groping, careless, anguished words were like strips or raw silk rubbed violently
together (for each was convince the other did not, could not, be equal to his love -
Leah doubted that any man was capable of a love so profound it could be silent, like
a forest pond; Gideon doubted that any woman was capable of comprehending the nature of a man's
passion, which might tear through him, rendering him broken and exhausted, as vulnerable
as a smalll child): it was on this tumultuous rain-lashed night that Mahalaleel came to
Bellefleur Manor on the western shore of the great Lake Noir, where he was to stay for
nearly five years.
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