that Blair Water people should see my niece in such a dress as that wretched black merino. And if Ellen Greene paid for it we must repay her. You should have told us that before we came away from Maywood. No, you are not going to church to-day. You can wear the black dress to school to-morrow. We can cover it up with an apron.”
Emily resigned herself with a sigh of disappointment to staying home; but it was very pleasant after all. Cousin Jimmy took her for a walk to the pond, showed her the graveyard and opened the book of yesterday for her.
“Why are all the Murrays buried here?” asked Emily. “Is it really because they are too good to be buried with common people?”
“No—no, pussy. We don’t carry our pride as far as that. When old Hugh Murray settled at New Moon there was nothing much but woods for miles and no graveyards nearer than Charlottetown. That’s why the old Murrays were buried here—and later on we kept it up because we wanted to lie with our own, here on the green, green banks of the old Blair Water.”
“That sounds like a line out of a poem, Cousin Jimmy,” said Emily.
“So it is—out of one of my poems.”
“I kind of like the idea of a ’sclusive burying-ground like this,” said Emily decidedly, looking around her approvingly at the velvet grass sloping down to the fairy-blue pond, the neat walks, the well-kept graves.
Cousin Jimmy chuckled.
“And yet they say you ain’t a Murray,” he said. “Murray and Byrd and Starr—and a dash of Shipley to boot, or Cousin Jimmy Murray is much mistaken.”
“Shipley?”
“Yes—Hugh Murray’s wife—your great-great-grandmother—was a Shipley—an Englishwoman. Ever hear of how the Murrays came to New Moon?”
