We moved up to the Glen when the little white house by the harbour could no longer hold us, and in the big house there, among the maples, the children arrived one after another until there were six.
Jem was the eldest, and the one who took things apart to see how they worked. Walter read poetry under a birch tree the children called the White Lady, and was teased for it at school, and did not stop. Nan and Di were twins who looked nothing alike and were proud of it. Shirley was quiet and brown and belonged, by his own choice and hers, to Susan. Rilla was the baby, and knew it, and made the most of it for years longer than was strictly necessary.
Susan Baker kept the house. That sentence does not begin to say it. Susan came to us as help and became the fixed point around which Ingleside turned. She had opinions on doctors’ wives, Methodists and the Kaiser, and a pie for every grief. She called me Mrs. Dr. dear to the end of her days.
There is not much to tell about those years, and that is exactly what I miss about them. Gilbert went out at all hours to deliver other people’s babies. The children came in with wet feet. There was a hollow below the house, with a brook and a grove of trees, where they played with the children from the manse, and named everything, as I had once named everything at Green Gables. They called it Rainbow Valley.
I thought, often, that I was the luckiest woman on the Island. I was right.