The Alpine Path, page 39 by Lucy Maud Montgomery
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intended there should be. Perhaps I worked all the tragedy out of my system in them, and left an unimpeded current of humour. I think it was my love of the dramatic that urged me to so much infanticide. In real life I couldn't have hurt a fly, and the thought that superfluous kittens had to be drowned was torture to me. But in my stories battle, murder and sudden death were the order of the day.
When I was fifteen I had my first ride on a railway train, and it was a long one. I went with Grandfather Montgomery to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, where Father had married again and was then living. I spent a year in Prince Albert and attended the High School there.
It was now three years since I had suffered so much mortification over "Evening Dreams." By this time my long-paralyzed ambition was beginning to recover and lift its head again. I wrote up the old Cape Leforce legend in rhyme and sent it down home to the Patriot, no more of the Examiner for me!
Four weeks passed. One afternoon Father came in with a copy of the Patriot. My verses were in it! It was the first sweet bubble on the cup of success and of course it intoxicated me. There were some fearful printers' errors in the poem which fairly made the flesh creep on my bones, but it was my poem, and in a real newspaper! The moment we see our first darling brain-child arrayed in black type is never to be forgotten. It has in it some of the wonderful awe and delight that comes to a mother when she looks for the first time on the face of her first born.
During that winter I had other verses and articles printed. A story I had written in a prize competition was published in the Montreal Witness, and a descriptive article on Saskatchewan was printed in the Prince Albert Times, and copied and commented on favourably by several Winnipeg papers. After several effusions on "June" and kindred subjects appeared in that long-suffering Patriot, I was beginning to plume myself on being quite a