Welcome to sleep stories with Steph your go-to podcast.
That offers you a calm and relaxing transition.
Into a great night's sleep.
It is time to relax and fully let go.
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Close your eyes.
And feel yourself sink into the support beneath you.
And let all the worries of the day go.
Drift away.
This is your time.
And your space.
Take a deep breath in through your nose.
And let it out with a long sigh.
That's it!
There is nothing you need to be doing now.
And know where you need to go.
Happy listening.
Chapter 7 The Book of Yesterday.
That first Saturday and Sunday at New Moon always stood out in Emily's memory as a very wonderful time.
So crowded was it with new and generally delightful impressions.
If it be true that we count time by heartthrobs,
Emily lived two years in it instead of two days.
Everything was fascinating from the moment she came down the long,
Polished staircase into the square hall that was filled with a soft rosy light.
Coming through the red glass panes of the front door.
Emily gazed through the panes delightedly.
What a strange,
Fascinating red world she beheld,
With a weird red sky that looked,
She thought,
As if it belonged to the Day of Judgment.
There was a certain charm about the old house which Emily felt keenly and responded to,
Although she was too young to understand it.
It was a house which aforetime had had vivid brides and mothers and wives,
And the atmosphere of their loves and lives still hung around it.
Not yet banished by the old maidishness of the regime of Elizabeth and Laura.
I'm going to love New Moon,
Thought Emily,
Quite amazed at the idea.
Aunt Laura was setting the breakfast table in the kitchen,
Which seemed quite bright and jolly in the glow of morning sunshine.
Even the black hole in the ceiling had ceased to be spookish and become only a commonplace entrance to the kitchen loft.
And on the red sandstone doorstep Saucy Sal was sitting,
Preening her fur as contentedly as if she'd lived in New Moon all her life.
Emily did not yet know it,
But Sal had already drunk deep the delight of battle with her peers that morning and taught the barn cats their place once and for all.
Claus and Jimmy's big yellow Tom had got a fearful drubbing and was minus several bits of his anatomy,
While a stuck-up black lady cat,
Who fancied herself considerably,
Had made up her mind if a grey-and-white,
Narrow-faced interloper from goodness knows where was going to stay at New Moon.
She was not.
Emily gathered Sal up in her arms and kissed her joyously to the horror of Aunt Elizabeth who was coming across the platform from the cookhouse with a plate of sizzling bacon.
Don't ever let me see you kissing a cat again!
She ordered.
Oh,
All right,
Grieved Emily cheerfully.
I'll only kiss her when you don't see me after this.
I don't want any of your pertness,
Miss.
You are not to kiss cats at all.
But Aunt Elizabeth,
I didn't kiss her on the mouth,
Of course.
I just kissed between her ears.
It's nice,
Won't you try it for once and see yourself?
That will do,
Emily,
You have said quite enough.
Sit down,
Elizabeth.
Then she sailed on into the kitchen,
Majestically,
Leaving Emily momentarily wretched.
She felt as if she had offended Aunt Elizabeth and she hadn't the least notion why or how.
But the scene before her was too interesting to worry long.
Delicious smells were coming from the cookhouse.
A little slant-roofed building at the corner with a big cooking stove was placed in summer.
It was thickly overgrown with hot vines as most of the new moon buildings were.
To the right was the new orchard,
Very wonderful now in blossom.
But rather a commonplace spot after all,
Since cousin Jimmy cultivated it in a most up-to-date fashion,
And had grain growing in the wide spaces between the straight rows of trees that looked all alike.
But on the other side of the barn lane,
Just behind the well,
Was the old orchard where Cousin Jimmy said the columbines grew.
And which seemed to be a delightful place where trees had come up at their own sweet will and grown into all different shapes and sizes.
Blue-eyed ivy twined about their roots and wild briar roses rioted over the grey paling fence.
Straight ahead,
Closing the vista between the orchards was a little slope covered with huge white birches,
Among which were the big new moon barns,
And beyond,
The new orchard.
Lay a little lovable red road.
Which looped lightly up and over a hill.
Until it seemed to touch the vivid blue of the sky.
Cousin Jimmy came down from the barns carrying brimming pails of milk.
And Emily ran with him to the dairy,
Behind the cookhouse.
Such a delightful spot she'd never seen or imagined.
It was a little snow white building in a clump of tall balm of gilliots.
Its grey roof was dotted over with cushions of moss-like,
Fat green,
Velvet mice.
He went down six sandstone steps with ferns crowding about them and opened a white door with a glass panel in it.
And then you went down three more steps and you were in a clean,
Earthy-smelling,
Damp,
Cool place with an earthen floor and windows screened by the delicate emerald of young hop vines.
There were wooden shelves all around,
Whereupon stood wide shallow pans of glossy brown ware full of milk coated over with cream so rich It was positively yellow.
Here Aunt Laura was waiting for them.
She strained the milk into empty pans and skimmed some of the full ones.
Emily thought skimming was a lovely occupation and longed to try her hand at it.
She also longed to sit right down and write a description of that dear dairy.
But alas,
There was no accountable cost.
Still,
She could write it in her head.
Squatting down on a three-legged stool in a dim corner,
She proceeded to do just that.
Sitting so still,
Jimmy and Laura forgot her and went away and later had to hunt for her for a quarter of an hour.
This unfortunately delayed breakfast and made Aunt Elizabeth very cross.
That Emily had found just the right sentence to define the clear yet dim green light that filled the dairy.
And she was so happy over it,
She didn't mind Aunt Elizabeth's black locks one bit.
After breakfast,
Aunt Elizabeth informed Emily henceforth it would be one of her duties to drive the cows to pasture every morning.
Jimmy has no hired man just now and it'll save him a few minutes.
Don't be afraid,
" added Aunt Laura.
The cows know the way,
So they'll go themselves.
You have only to follow and shut the gates.
I'm not afraid.
Said Emily.
But she was.
She knew nothing about cows.
Still,
She was determined the Murray should not suspect Estelle was scared.
So,
Her heart beating like a trip hammer,
She sallied valiantly forth and found that what Aunt Laura had said was true.
Cows were not such ferocious animals after all.
They went gravely on ahead,
And she had only to follow them through the old orchard,
Then through the shrub maple grove beyond,
Along a twisted,
Ferny path where the wind woman was purring and peeping around the maple clumps.
Emily loitered by the pasture gate until her eager eyes had taken in all the geography of the landscape.
Beyond the old pasture was the Blair Water Valley filled with homesteads and further out the great sweep of the white capped gulf.
It seemed to Emily's eyes a charming land of green shadows and blue waters.
Down in one corner of the pasture walled off by an old stone dike.
Was the little private graveyard where the dead and gone Murrays were buried.
Emily wanted to go and explore it.
But she was afraid to trust herself in the pasture.
I'll go as soon as I get better acquainted with the cows,
" she told herself.
She felt that before she went back she must slip along the pasture fence and explore a certain path which she saw entering the grove of spruce and maple further down.
To the left of the pasture field was a house of a quite different type.
A big old house tangled with vines.
It had a flat roof.
And a general air of indifference and neglect.
Its large laws untidy,
Overgrown with unpruned shrubs and trees.
These straggled right down to the pond where enormous willows drooped over the water.
Emily decided she would ask Cousin Jimmy about that when she got a good chance.
When she went down,
She found the path led straight into Fairyland.
It was a wild,
Dear little path for Lady Verne's,
Beckoning and blowing along it.
She breathed in the tang of fir balsam and saw the shimmer of gossamers high up in the boughs.
Here and there the young maple branches interlaced as if to make a screen from dry-eyed faces.
Emily knew all about dryads thanks to her father,
And the great sheets of moss under the trees were meant for Titania's couch.
This must be one of the places where dreams grow,
" said Emily happily.
She wished that path might go on forever.
But presently it veered away from the brook and when she'd scrambled over a mossy old bald fence She found herself back in the front garden of New Moon,
Where Cousin Jimmy was pruning some bushes.
Oh Cousin Jimmy I found the dearest little road,
She said breathlessly.
Coming up through Lofty John's Bush Isn't that owl bush?
Asked Emily,
Rather disappointed.
No,
But it ought to be.
50 years ago Uncle Archibald sold that jogger land to Lofty John's father.
Mike Sullivan He built a little house down near the pond and lived there till he quarrelled with Uncle Archibald,
Which wasn't long of course.
Then he moved his house across the road.
Lofty John lives there now.
Aunt Elizabeth tried to buy the land back from him.
She offered him more than it's worth,
But lofty John won't sell just for spite.
Seeing as he has a good farm of his own and this piece ain't much to him.
He only pastures a few young cattle on it through the summer.
And what was cleared is all growing up with scrub maple now.
That's a thorn in Elizabeth's side,
And likely to be as long as lofty John Nurses' spikes.
Why is he called Lofty John?
Because he's a high and lofty fellow.
But never mind Tim,
I want to show you around my garden Emily.
It's mine!
Elizabeth bosses the farm,
But she lets me run the garden to make up for pushing me into the well.
Did she do that?
Yeah,
She didn't mean to.
We were just kids and I was here on a visit and the men were putting a new hood on the well and cleaning it.
It was open and we were playing tag around it.
I made Elizabeth mad,
Forget what I said,
But it wasn't hard to make her mad,
You understand,
And she made to give me a bang on the head.
I saw it coming.
Step back to get out of the way.
And down I went head first.
Don't remember anything more about that.
Folks say I've never been quite right since.
Said Cousin Jimmy,
Shaking his head.
They only say that though because I'm a poet,
Because nothing ever worries me.
Poets are so scarce in Blairwater,
Folks don't understand them.
Won't you recite me some of your poetry,
Cousin Jimmy?
Asked Emily eagerly.
Oh,
When the spirit moves me,
I will.
It's no use to ask me when the spirit don't move me.
How am I to know when the spirit moves you?
I'll be giving my owner a call to recite the compositions.
But I'll tell you this,
The spirit generally does move me when I'm boiling the pig's potatoes in the fall.
Remember that.
And remember to be around.
Cousin Jimmy's garden was a beautiful place,
Well worth his pride.
It seemed like a garden where no frost could wither or rough wind blow.
A garden remembering a hundred vanished summers.
There was a high hedge of clipped spruce all around it,
Spaced at intervals by tall lombardies.
The north side was closed in by a thick grove of spruce,
Against which a long row of peonies grow.
Their red blossoms splendid against its darkness.
Your great-great-grandfather,
Hugh Murray,
" he continued.
I'd had that brought up from the old country.
Pointing to a sundial of grey stone placed just where the broad red walk that was bordered with striped grass ran off into Lofty John's bush.
Isn't the grass about it like sun-green velvet?
Said Cousin Jimmy making a splendid gesture.
I confer the freedom of it upon you.
Good luck and you might find the lost diamond!
Lost diamond?
" said Emily,
Wondering.
Fascinating thing was this.
.
.
Never hear the story.
Well,
I'll tell it tomorrow,
" said Jimmy.
Sunday's lazy day at New Moon.
Now I must get my turnips off,
Or I'll have Elizabeth looking out for me.
She won't say anything,
She'll just look.
Have you ever seen the real Marie look?
Yes,
" said Emily ruefully.
I guess I did see it.
And Aunt Ruth pulled me out.
From under the table.
We're a darn queer lot.
Said Jimmy.
It's well known,
The Murray Pride.
But we're the finest people ever happened.
I'll tell you all about us.
Tomorrow.
