I Have Come Home (1938 sketch)

“I Have Come Home,” a rarely seen sketch by L.M. Montgomery, is significant for two entirely different reasons.

Editorial Note

On 30 November 2014, the 140th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth, I published a blog post in which I shared for the first time the full text of “I Have Come Home.” This long-lost sketch by Montgomery had appeared in the 15 June 1936 issue ofThe Family Herald and Weekly Star—or so I stated at the time. But earlier this year, when I compiled a list of Montgomery’s shorter works published in 1936, I started to have my doubts about this.

Between 6 May and 1 July 1936, Montgomery published eight short stories in The Family Herald and Weekly Star, each consisting of a standalone episode in Anne of Windy Poplars, released later that year. True, no story appeared in the 17 June 1936 issue, so perhaps I’d written down “15 June” instead of “17 June” by mistake. But how likely was it that the magazine had pushed back a short story in order to make room for another piece by the same author?

I went back to my copy of the issue—a print-out of a microfilm from a long-ago trip to the Toronto Reference Library. The print-out consists solely of the column in which Montgomery’s sketch appeared—not the full page. The publication details appear in my own handwriting along the edge of the print-out.

Returning to a Toronto library just to double-check a date didn’t seem like the best use of my time, and I couldn’t find a digital copy of this magazine online. So I made an interlibrary loan request through my university library and hoped someone might be willing to do a bit of sleuthing for me:

My files indicate that this was published in the 15 June 1936 issue, but other items published this month indicate that the magazine was published every Wednesday. Another possibility is that the year I have is wrong and the piece was published on 15 June 1938. Hopefully one of these is correct. Thank you!

It turns out that my second theory was the correct one: the sketch did appear in the 15 June 1938 issue. But in my defence, the “8” that appears on that page is rather blurry, so I can see how I misread it for a 6.

“I Have Come Home” is significant for an entirely different reason. Montgomery used it as a starting point for a chapter on Prince Edward Island that she contributed the following year to The Spirit of Canada (1939), published by the Canadian Pacific Railway as a souvenir album that would be presented to the King and Queen of England during their royal visit to Canada in May 1939. That version is included in volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader. (B.L.)

I Have Come Home

L.M. Montgomery, “I Have Come Home,” The Family Herald and Weekly Star (Montreal), 15 June 1938, 47.

There is at least one spot left on earth where a little leisure is to be found . . . and that is in Prince Edward Island. People there have not yet forgotten how to live. They don’t tear through life. Every time I . . . accustomed to the breathless tempo of existence elsewhere . . . go back to it I am impressed by this fact.

There is about life in “Abegweit” a certain innate and underlying serenity that is never wholly absent, even on days when a church “tea” is in the offing or the hay on the hill field must be got in before it rains. They realize that eternity exists . . . no. We realize it. For I am one of “the Islanders” still, though I have made my home in another land for a quarter of a century. We know that “he who believeth shall not make haste” . . . shall not run hither and yon aimlessly chasing the will-o’-wisps of ambition and fortune and power. We are all born knowing that “our own will come to us” . . . we have only to wait.

It is a great thing for a land to have this birthright . . . this background . . . this unfailing “oneness” with the great Eternal Spirit of beauty and reality and peace. Peace! You never know what peace is until you walk on the shores or in the fields of Prince Edward Island on a summer twilight when the dew is falling and the old old stars are peeping out and the sea keeps its nightly tryst with the little land it loves. You find your soul then . . . you realize that youth is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart. And you look around on the dimming landscape of haunted hill and murmuring ocean, of homestead lights and old fields tilled by dead and gone generations who loved them . . . and you say, “I have come home!”

Notes

“he who believeth shall not make haste.” The Bible, Isaiah 28:16 (KJV): “he that believeth shall not make haste.”

“our own will come to us.” The source of this allusion is unclear.

Citation

Montgomery, L.M. “I Have Come Home.” Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. L.M. Montgomery Online, 13 September 2024, https://lmmonline.org/articles/i-have-come-home/.