afternoon with Diana, and Anne had come over to play with them.
Anne and Diana had spent most of their playtime that summer on and about
the pond. Idlewild was a thing of the past, Mr. Bell having ruthlessly
cut down the little circle of trees in his back pasture in the spring.
Anne had sat among the stumps and wept, not without an eye to the
romance of it; but she was speedily consoled, for, after all, as she and
Diana said, big girls of thirteen, going on fourteen, were too old for
such childish amusements as playhouses, and there were more fascinating
sports to be found about the pond. It was splendid to fish for trout
over the bridge and the two girls learned to row themselves about in the
little flat-bottomed dory Mr. Barry kept for duck shooting.
It was Anne s idea that they dramatize Elaine. They had studied
Tennyson s poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of
Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince
Edward Island schools. They had analyzed and parsed it and torn it to
pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all
left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and
Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them, and Anne
was devoured by secret regret that she had not been born in Camelot.
Those days, she said, were so much more romantic than the present.
Anne s plan was hailed with enthusiasm. The girls had discovered that if
the flat were pushed off from the landing place it would drift down
with the current under the bridge and finally strand itself on another
headland lower down which ran out at a curve in the pond. They had often
gone down like this and nothing could be more convenient for playing
Elaine.
Well, I ll be Elaine, said Anne, yielding reluctantly, for, although
she would have been delighted to play the principal character, yet
her artistic sense demanded fitness for it and this, she felt, her
limitations made impossible. Ruby, you must be King Arthur and Jane
will be Guinevere and Diana must be Lancelot. But first you must be the
brothers and the father. We can t have the old dumb servitor because
there isn t room for two in the flat when one is lying down. We must
pall the barge all its length in blackest samite. That old black shawl
of your mother s will be just the thing, Diana.
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