Music Welcome to Snewscast, the podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on snewscast.com and follow us on Instagram at snewscast to find behind the scenes content. If you enjoy our show, you can help new listeners find us by writing a review on the Apple Podcast app. Also, you can share us with a friend. This episode is dedicated to our patron Karen who requested this story and brought to you by Misty Green Branches. Tonight we'll read excerpts from Emily of New Moon written by L. M. Moncomrey, similar to the author's other series Anne of Green Gables. This is the first in a series of novels about an orphan girl growing up on Prince Edward Island.

Emily is a heroine with a love for the beauty of nature and art, loyalty to her friends,

a thirst for knowledge, and a passionate dedication to her writing.

Let's get cozy.

Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. Chapter 1. The House in the Hollow The house in the Hollow was a mile from anywhere, so Maywood people said. It was situated in a grassy little dail, looking as if it had never been built like other houses, but had grown up there like a big, brown mushroom. It was reached by a long green lane and almost hidden from view by an encircling growth of young birches. No other house could be seen from it, although the village was just over the hill. Ellen Green said it was the loonsomest place in the world, and vowed that she wouldn't stay there a day if it wasn't that she pitted the child. Emily didn't know she was being pitted and didn't know what loonsumness meant. She had plenty of company. There was father and Mike and saucy-sale. The wind woman was always around and there were the trees, Adam and Eve and the rooster pine and all the friendly lady-burches. And there was the flash, too. She never knew when it might come, and the possibility of it kept her a thrill and expectant. Emily had slipped away in the chilly twilight for a walk. She remembered that walk very vividly all her life, perhaps because of a certain eerie beauty that was in it. Perhaps because the flash came from the first time in weeks. More likely because of what happened after she came back from it. It had been a dull, cold day in early May, threatening to rain but never raining. Father had lain on the sitting room lounge all day. He had coughed a good deal, and he had not talked much to Emily, which was a very unusual thing for him. Most of the time he lay with his hands clapped under his head, and his large, sunken, dark blue eyes fixed dreamily, and unseeingly on the cloudy sky that was visible between the bows of the two big spruces in the front yard. Atam and Eve they always called those spruces, because of a whimsical resemblance Emily had traced between their position, with the reference to a small apple tree between them. And that of Adam and Eve and the Tree of Knowledge in an old fashioned picture in one of Ellen Green's books. The Tree of Knowledge looked exactly like the squat little apple tree and Adam and Eve stood up on either side as stiffly and rigidly as did the spruces. Emily wondered what father was thinking of, but she never bothered him with questions when his cough was bad. She only wished she had somebody to talk to. Ellen Green wouldn't talk that day either. She did nothing but grunt, and grunt meant that Ellen was disturbed about something. She had grunted last night after the doctor had whispered to her in the kitchen, and she had grunted when she gave Emily a bedtime snack of bread and molasses. Emily did not like bread and molasses, but she ate it because she did not want to hurt Ellen's feelings. It was not often that Ellen allowed her anything to eat before going to bed. And when she did, it meant that for some reason or other, she wanted to confer a special favor. Emily expected the grunting attack would wear off overnight, as it generally did, but it had not. So no company was to be found in Ellen. Not that there was a great deal to be found at any time. Douglas Star had once, in a fit of exasperation, told Emily that Ellen Green was a lazy old thing of no importance, and Emily, whenever she looked at Ellen after that, thought the description fitted her to a hair. So Emily had curled herself up in the ragged, comfortable, wingchair, and read the Pilgrims' progress all the afternoon. Emily loved the Pilgrim's progress. Many a time had she walked the straight and narrow path with Christian and Christiana, although she never liked Christiana's adventures half as well as Christians. For one thing, there was always such a crowd with Cristiana. She had not half the fascination of that solitary, intrepid figure who faced all alone the shadows of the dark valley and the encounter with a pollion. Darkness and hobgoblins were nothing when you had plenty of company. But to be alone, ah, Emily shivered with the deliciousness of it. When Ellen announced that supper was ready, Douglas star told Emily to go out to it. I don't want anything tonight. I'll Just lie here and rest. And when you come in again, we'll have a real talk, Elfkin. He smiled up at her, his old, beautiful smile with the love behind it, that Emily always found so sweet. She ate her supper quite happily, though it wasn't a good supper. The bread was soggy, and her egg was underdone. But for a wonder, She was allowed to have both saucy-soul and Mike sitting one on each side of her. And Ellen only grunted when Emily fed them wee bits of bread and butter. Mike had such a cute way of sitting up on his haunches and catching the bits in his paws. And saucy-sale had her trick of touching Emily's ankle with an almost human touch when her turn was not long coming. loved them both, but Mike was her favorite. He was a handsome, dark grey cat with huge, owl-like eyes, and he was so soft and fat and fluffy. The owl was always thin. No amount of feeding put any flash on her bones. Emily liked her, but never cared to cuddle or stroke her because of her thinness. Yet there was a sort of weird beauty about her that appealed to Emily. She was gray and white, very white and very sleek, with a long, pointed face, very long ears and very green eyes. She was a redoubtable fighter, and strange cats were vanquished in one round. The fearless little spitfire would even attack dogs and route them utterly. Emily loved her cats. She had brought them up herself, as she proudly said. They had been given to her when they were kittens by her Sunday school teacher. A living present is so nice, she told Ellen, because it keeps on getting nicer all the time. But she worried considerably because saucy sal didn't have kittens. I don't know why she doesn't. She complained to Ellen Green. Cats seem to have more kittens than they know what to do with. After supper, Emily went in and found that her father had fallen asleep. She was very Like loud of this, she knew he had not slept much for two nights, but she was a little disappointed that they were not going to have that real talk. Real talks with father were always such delightful things. But next best would be a walk, a lovely all by your lonesome walk through the grey evening of the young spring. It was so long since she yet had a walk. You put on your hood and mind you scoot back if it starts to rain. Warren Dellen, you can't monkey with colds the way some kids can. Why can't I? Emily asked. Rather indignantly, why must she be to bard from monkey-ing with colds if other children could? It wasn't fair. But Ellen only grunted. Emily muttered under her breath for her own satisfaction. You are a lazy old thing of no importance and slipped upstairs to get her hood. Rather reluctantly, for she loved to run bare-headed. She put the faded blue hood on over her long, heavy braid of glossy, jet-black hair, And smiled chumly at her reflection in the little greenish glass. The smile began at the corners of her lips and spread over her face in a slow, subtle, very wonderful way as Douglas Star often thought. It was her dead mother's smile, the thing that had caught and held him long ago when he had first seen Juliet Murray. It seemed to be Emily's only physical inheritance from her mother. And all else he thought she was like the stars. her large, purplish gray eyes with their very long lashes with black brows in her high white forehead too high for beauty in the delicate modeling of her pale oval face and and sensitive mouth. In the little ears that were pointed just a wee bit to show that she was kin to tribes of Elfland. I'm going for a walk with the Wind Woman, dear, said Emily. I wish I could take you too. Do you ever get out of that room, I wonder? The Wind Woman is going to be out in the fields tonight. She is tall and misty. Thin Gray silky clothes blowing all about her, and wings like a bats. Only you can see through them, and shining eyes like stars looking through her long loose hair. She can fly. But tonight she will walk with me all over the fields. She's a great friend of mine, the wind woman is. I've known her ever since I was six. We're old old friends, but not quite so old as you and I, little Emily in the glass. We've been friends always, haven't we? With a blown kiss to little Emily in the glass. Emily out of the glass was off. The wind woman was waiting for her outside, ruffling the little spears of striped grass that were sticking up stiffly in the bed under the sitting-room window, tossing the big boughs of Adam and Eve, whispering among the misty green branches of the birches, teasing the rooster pine behind the house. It really did look like an enormous, ridiculous rooster, with a huge bungee tail and a head thrown back to crow. It was so long since Emily had been out for a walk that she was half crazy with the joy of it.

The winter had been so stormy, and the snow so deep that she was never allowed out. April had been a month of rain and wind. So on this May evening, she felt like a released prisoner. Where should she go? Down the brook, or over the fields to the spruce barons? Emily chose the latter. She loved the spruce barons away at the further end of the long sloping pasture. That was a place where Mad Jack was made. She came more more fully into her fairy birthright there than in any other place. Nobody who saw Emily skimming over the bare field would have envied her. She was little and pale and poorly clad. Sometimes she shivered in her thin jacket. Yet a queen might have gladly given a crown for her visions, her dreams of wonder, the brown frosted grasses under her feet were velvet piles. The old mossy, gnarled half dead spruce tree under which she paused for a moment to look up into the sky was a marble column in a palace of the gods. The far dusky hills were the ramparts of of a city of wonder. And for companions she had all the fairies of

the countryside, for she could believe in them here. The fairies of the white clover and satin catkins, the little green folk of the grass, the elves of the young furtries, sprites of wind and wild fern and thistle down. Anything might happen there. Everything might come true. And the barons were such a splendid place in which to play hide and seek with the wind woman. She was so very real there. If you could just spring quickly enough around a little cluster of spruces, only you never could. You would see her as well as feel her and hear her. There she was. That was the sweep of her gray cloak. No, she was laughing up in the very top of the taller trees. And the chase was on again. Till all at once, it seemed as if the windwoman were gone, and the evening was bathed in a wonderful silence, and there was a sudden rift in the curdled clouds westward, and a lovely pale, Pinky green lake of sky with a new moon in it. Emily stood and looked at it with clasped hands and her little black head upturned. She must go home and write down a description of it in the yellow account book where the last thing written had been Mike's biography. He would heard her with its beauty until she wrote it down. Then she would read it to father. She must not forget how the tips of the trees on the hill came out like fine black lace across the edge of the pinkie grain sky. And then for one glorious supreme moment came the flash. Emily called it that, although she felt that the name didn't exactly describe it, it couldn't be described, not even to father, who always seemed a little puzzled by it. Emily never spoke of it to anyone else. It had always seemed to Emily ever since she could remember that She was very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain. She could never draw the curtain aside, but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it, and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond only a glimpse and heard note of unearthly music. This moment came rarely, went swiftly, leaving her breathless with the inexpressible delight of it. She could never recall it, never summon it, never pretend it, but the wonder of it stayed with her for days. It never came twice with the same thing. Tonight, the dark boughs against that far off sky had given it. It had come with the high wild note of wind in the night, with a shadow wave over a ripe field. With a greybird lighting on her window sill in a storm, with the singing of holy, holy, holy in church, with the glimpse of the kitchen fire when she had come home on a dark, autumn night with the spirit like blue, a frost on a twilight pain. With a Felicitis new word, when she was writing down a description of something. And always, when the flash came to her, Emily felt that life was a wonderful, mysterious thing of persistent beauty. He scuttled back to the house in the hollow through the gathering twilight, all a gawk to get home and write down her description before the memory picture of what she had seen grew a little blurred. She knew just how she would begin it. The sentence seemed to shape itself in her mind. But he'll to me, and something in me called back to it. She found Ellen Greene waiting for her on the sunken front doorstep. Emily was so full of happiness that she loved everything at that moment, even lazy things of no importance. She flung her arms around Ellen's knees and hugged them.

Ellen looked down into the wrapped little face.

Where excitement had kindled a faint wild rose flush. you