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Anne of Avonlea

by L. M. Montgomery · English · Gutenberg #47 · 507,404 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Anne of Avonlea

Author: L. M. Montgomery


        
Release date: March 8, 2006 [eBook #47]
                Most recently updated: September 12, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47

Credits: An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ANNE OF AVONLEA ***
[Illustration]




ANNE OF AVONLEA

by Lucy Maud Montgomery




To
my former teacher
HATTIE GORDON SMITH
in grateful remembrance of her
sympathy and encouragement.




Flowers spring to blossom where she walks
    The careful ways of duty,
Our hard, stiff lines of life with her
    Are flowing curves of beauty.
—WHITTIER


Contents

 CHAPTER I. An Irate Neighbor
 CHAPTER II. Selling in Haste and Repenting at Leisure
 CHAPTER III. Mr. Harrison at Home
 CHAPTER IV. Different Opinions
 CHAPTER V. A Full-fledged Schoolma’am
 CHAPTER VI. All Sorts and Conditions of Men . . . and women
 CHAPTER VII. The Pointing of Duty
 CHAPTER VIII. Marilla Adopts Twins
 CHAPTER IX. A Question of Color
 CHAPTER X. Davy in Search of a Sensation
 CHAPTER XI. Facts and Fancies
 CHAPTER XII. A Jonah Day
 CHAPTER XIII. A Golden Picnic
 CHAPTER XIV. A Danger Averted
 CHAPTER XV. The Beginning of Vacation
 CHAPTER XVI. The Substance of Things Hoped For
 CHAPTER XVII. A Chapter of Accidents
 CHAPTER XVIII. An Adventure on the Tory Road
 CHAPTER XIX. Just a Happy Day
 CHAPTER XX. The Way It Often Happens
 CHAPTER XXI. Sweet Miss Lavendar
 CHAPTER XXII. Odds and Ends
 CHAPTER XXIII. Miss Lavendar’s Romance
 CHAPTER XXIV. A Prophet in His Own Country
 CHAPTER XXV. An Avonlea Scandal
 CHAPTER XXVI. Around the Bend
 CHAPTER XXVII. An Afternoon at the Stone House
 CHAPTER XXVIII. The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace
 CHAPTER XXIX. Poetry and Prose
 CHAPTER XXX. A Wedding at the Stone House




 I
An Irate Neighbor


A tall, slim girl, “half-past sixteen,” with serious gray eyes and hair
which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red
sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe
afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of
Virgil.

But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes,
little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing slendor
of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a
corner of the cherry orchard, was fitter for dreams than dead
languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheeded to the ground, and Anne,
her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid
mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr. J. A.
Harrison’s house like a great white mountain, was far away in a
delicious world where a certain schoolteacher was doing a wonderful
work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful
minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions.

To be sure, if you came down to harsh facts . . . which, it must be
confessed, Anne seldom did until she had to . . . it did not seem
likely that there was much promising material for celebrities in
Avonlea school; but you could never tell what might happen if a teacher
used her influence for good. Anne had certain rose-tinted ideals of
what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about
it; and she was in the midst of a delightful scene, forty years hence,
with a famous personage . . . just exactly what he was to be famous for
was left in convenient haziness, but Anne thought it would be rather
nice to have him a college president or a Canadian premier . . . bowing
low over her wrinkled hand and assuring her that it was she who had
first kindled his ambition, and that all his success in life was due to
the lessons she had instilled so long ago in Avonlea school. This
pleasant vision was shattered by a most unpleasant interruption.

A demure little Jersey cow came scuttling down the lane and five
seconds later Mr. Harrison arrived . . . if “arrived” be not too mild a
term to describe the manner of his irruption into the yard.

He bounced over the fence without waiting to open the gate, and angrily
confronted astonished Anne, who had risen to her feet and stood looking
at him in some bewilderment. Mr. Harrison was their new righthand
neighbor and she had never met him before, although she had seen him
once or twice.

In early April, before Anne had come home from Queen’s, Mr. Robert
Bell, whose farm adjoined the Cuthbert place on the west, had sold out
and moved to Charlottetown. His farm had been bought by a certain Mr.
J. A. Harrison, whose name, and the fact that he was a New Brunswick
man, were all that was known about him. But before he had been a month
in Avonlea he had won the reputation of being an odd person . . . “a
crank,” Mrs. Rachel Lynde said. Mrs. Rachel was an outspoken lady, as
those of you who may have already made her acquaintance will remember.
Mr. Harrison was certainly different from other people . . . and that
is the essential characteristic of a crank, as everybody knows.

In the first place he kept house for himself and had publicly stated
that he wanted no fools of women around his diggings. Feminine Avonlea
took its revenge by the gruesome tales it related about his
house-keeping and cooking. He had hired little John Henry Carter of
White Sands and John Henry started the stories. For one thing, there
was never any stated time for meals in the Harrison establishment. Mr.
Harrison “got a bite” when he felt hungry, and if John Henry were
around at the time, he came in for a share, but if he were not, he had
to wait until Mr. Harrison’s next hungry spell. John Henry mournfully
averred that he would have starved to death if it wasn’t that he got
home on Sundays and got a good filling up, and that his mother always
gave him a basket of “grub” to take back with him on Monday mornings.

As for washing dishes, Mr. Harrison never made any pretence of doing it
unless a rainy Sunday came. Then he went to work and washed them all at
once in the rainwater hogshead, and left them to drain dry.

Again, Mr. Harrison was “close.” When he was asked to subscribe to the
Rev. Mr. Allan’s salary he said he’d wait and see how many dollars’
worth of good he got out of his preaching first . . . he didn’t believe
in buying a pig in a poke. And when Mrs. Lynde went to ask for a
contribution to missions . . . and incidentally to see the inside of
the house . . . he told her there were more heathens among the old
woman gossips in Avonlea than anywhere else he knew of, and he’d
cheerfully contribute to a mission for Christianizing them if she’d
undertake it. Mrs. Rachel got herself away and said it was a mercy poor
Mrs. Robert Bell was safe in her grave, for it would have broken her
heart to see the state of her house in which she used to take so much
pride.

“Why, she scrubbed the kitchen floor every second day,” Mrs. Lynde told
Marilla Cuthbert indignantly, “and if you could see it now! I had to
hold up my skirts as I walked across it.”

Finally, Mr. Harrison kept a parrot called Ginger. Nobody in Avonlea
had ever kept a parrot before; consequently that proceeding was
considered barely respectable. And such a parrot! If you took John
Henry Carter’s word for it, never was such an unholy bird. It swore
terribly. Mrs. Carter would have taken John Henry away at once if she
had been sure she could get another place for him. Besides, Ginger had
bitten a piece right out of the back of John Henry’s neck one day when
he had stooped down too near the cage. Mrs. Carter showed everybody the
mark when the luckless John Henry went home on Sundays.

All these things flashed through Anne’s mind as Mr. Harrison stood,
quite speechless with wrath apparently, before her. In his most amiable
mood Mr. Harrison could not have been considered a handsome man; he was
short and fat and bald; and now, with his round face purple with rage
and his prominent blue eyes almost sticking out of his head, Anne
thought he was really the ugliest person she had ever seen.

All at once Mr. Harrison found his voice.

“I’m not going to put up with this,” he spluttered, “not a day longer,
do you hear, miss. Bless my soul, this is the third time, miss . . .
the third time! Patience has ceased to be a virtue, miss. I warned your
aunt the last time not to let it occur again . . . and she’s let it . .
. she’s done it . . . what does she mean by it, that is what I want to
know. That is what I’m here about, miss.”

“Will you explain what the trouble is?” asked Anne, in her most
dignified manner. She had been practicing it considerably of late to
have it in good working order when school began; but it had no apparent
effect on the irate J. A. Harrison.

“Trouble, is it? Bless my soul, trouble enough, I should think. The
trouble is, miss, that I found that Jersey cow of your aunt’s in my
oats again, not half an hour ago. The third time, mark you. I found her
in last Tuesday and I found her in yesterday. I came here and told your
aunt not to let it occur again. She has let it occur again. Where’s
your aunt, miss? I just want to see her for a minute and give her a
piece of my mind . . . a piece of J. A. Harrison’s mind, miss.”

“If you mean Miss Marilla Cuthbert, she is not my aunt, and she has
gone down to East Grafton to see a distant relative of hers who is very
ill,” said Anne, with due increase of dignity at every word. “I am very
sorry that my cow should have broken into your oats . . . she is my cow
and not Miss Cuthbert’s . . . Matthew gave her to me three years ago
when she was a little calf and he bought her from Mr. Bell.”

“Sorry, miss! Sorry isn’t going to help matters any. You’d better go
and look at the havoc that animal has made in my oats . . . trampled
them from center to circumference, miss.”

“I am very sorry,” repeated Anne firmly, “but perhaps if you kept your
fences in better repair Dolly might not have broken in. It is your part
of the line fence that separates your oatfield from our pasture and I
noticed the other day that it was not in very good condition.”

“My fence is all right,” snapped Mr. Harrison, angrier than ever at
this carrying of the war into the enemy’s country. “The jail fence
couldn’t keep a demon of a cow like that out. And I can tell you, you
redheaded snippet, that if the cow is yours, as you say, you’d be
better employed in watching her out of other people’s grain than in
sitting round reading yellow-covered novels,” . . . with a scathing
glance at the innocent tan-colored Virgil by Anne’s feet.

Something at that moment was red besides Anne’s hair . . . which had
always been a tender point with her.

“I’d rather have red hair than none at all, except a little fringe
round my ears,” she flashed.

The shot told, for Mr. Harrison was really very sensitive about his
bald head. His anger choked him up again and he could only glare
speechlessly at Anne, who recovered her temper and followed up her
advantage.

“I can make allowance for you, Mr. Harrison, because I have an
imagination. I can easily imagine how very trying it must be to find a
cow in your oats and I shall not cherish any hard feelings against you
for the things you’ve said. I promise you that Dolly shall never break
into your oats again. I give you my word of honor on _that_ point.”

“Well, mind you she doesn’t,” muttered Mr. Harrison in a somewhat
subdued tone; but he stamped off angrily enough and Anne heard him
growling to himself until he was out of earshot.

Grievously disturbed in mind, Anne marched across the yard and shut the
naughty Jersey up in the milking pen.

“She can’t possibly get out of that unless she tears the fence down,”
she reflected. “She looks pretty quiet now. I daresay she has sickened
herself on those oats. I wish I’d sold her to Mr. Shearer when he
wanted her last week, but I thought it was just as well to wait until
we had the auction of the stock and let them all go together. I believe
it is true about Mr. Harrison being a crank. Certainly there’s nothing
of the kindred spirit about _him_.”

Anne had always a weather eye open for kindred spirits.

Marilla Cuthbert was driving into the yard as Anne returned from the
house, and the latter flew to get tea ready. They discussed the matter
at the tea table.

“I’ll be glad when the auction is over,” said Marilla. “It is too much
responsibility having so much stock about the place and nobody but that
unreliable Martin to look after them. He has never come back yet and he
promised that he would certainly be back last night if I’d give him the
day off to go to his aunt’s funeral. I don’t know how many aunts he has
got, I am sure. That’s the fourth that’s died since he hired here a
year ago. I’ll be more than thankful when the crop is in and Mr. Barry
takes over the farm. We’ll have to keep Dolly shut up in the pen till
Martin comes, for she must be put in the back pasture and the fences
there have to be fixed. I declare, it is a world of trouble, as Rachel
says. Here’s poor Mary Keith dying and what is to become of those two
children of hers is more than I know. She has a brother in British
Columbia and she has written to him about them, but she hasn’t heard
from him yet.”

“What are the children like? How old are they?”

“Six past . . . they’re twins.”

“Oh, I’ve always been especially interested in twins ever since Mrs.
Hammond had so many,” said Anne eagerly. “Are they pretty?”

“Goodness, you couldn’t tell . . . they were too dirty. Davy had been
out making mud pies and Dora went out to call him in. Davy pushed her
headfirst into the biggest pie and then, because she cried, he got into
it himself and wallowed in it to show her it was nothing to cry about.
Mary said Dora was really a very good child but that Davy was full of
mischief. He has never had any bringing up you might say. His father
died when he was a baby and Mary has been sick almost ever since.”

“I’m always sorry for children that have no bringing up,” said Anne
soberly. “You know _I_ hadn’t any till you took me in hand. I hope
their uncle will look after them. Just what relation is Mrs. Keith to
you?”

“Mary? None in the world. It was her husband . . . he was our third
cousin. There’s Mrs. Lynde coming through the yard. I thought she’d be
up to hear about Mary.”

“Don’t tell her about Mr. Harrison and the cow,” implored Anne.

Marilla promised; but the promise was quite unnecessary, for Mrs. Lynde
was no sooner fairly seated than she said,

“I saw Mr. Harrison chasing your Jersey out of his oats today when I
was coming home from Carmody. I thought he looked pretty mad. Did he
make much of a rumpus?”

Anne and Marilla furtively exchanged amused smiles. Few things in
Avonlea ever escaped Mrs. Lynde. It was only that morning Anne had
said,

“If you went to your own room at midnight, locked the door, pulled down
the blind, and _sneezed_, Mrs. Lynde would ask you the next day how
your cold was!”

“I believe he did,” admitted Marilla. “I was away. He gave Anne a piece
of his mind.”

“I think he is a very disagreeable man,” said Anne, with a resentful
toss of her ruddy head.

“You never said a truer word,” said Mrs. Rachel solemnly. “I knew
there’d be trouble when Robert Bell sold his place to a New Brunswick
man, that’s what. I don’t know what Avonlea is coming to, with so many
strange people rushing into it. It’ll soon not be safe to go to sleep
in our beds.”

“Why, what other strangers are coming in?” asked Marilla.

“Haven’t you heard? Well, there’s a family of Donnells, for one thing.
They’ve rented Peter Sloane’s old house. Peter has hired the man to run
his mill. They belong down east and nobody knows anything about them.
Then that shiftless Timothy Cotton family are going to move up from
White Sands and they’ll simply be a burden on the public. He is in
consumption . . . when he isn’t stealing . . . and his wife is a
slack-twisted creature that can’t turn her hand to a thing. She washes
her dishes _sitting down_. Mrs. George Pye has taken her husband’s
orphan nephew, Anthony Pye. He’ll be going to school to you, Anne, so
you may expect trouble, that’s what. And you’ll have another strange
pupil, too. Paul Irving is coming from the States to live with his
grandmother. You remember his father, Marilla . . . Stephen Irving, him
that jilted Lavendar Lewis over at Grafton?”

“I don’t think he jilted her. There was a quarrel . . . I suppose there
was blame on both sides.”

“Well, anyway, he didn’t marry her, and she’s been as queer as possible
ever since, they say . . . living all by herself in that little stone
house she calls Echo Lodge. Stephen went off to the States and went
into business with his uncle and married a Yankee. He’s never been home
since, though his mother has been up to see him once or twice. His wife
died two years ago and he’s sending the boy home to his mother for a
spell. He’s ten years old and I don’t know if he’ll be a very desirable
pupil. You can never tell about those Yankees.”

Mrs Lynde looked upon all people who had the misfortune to be born or
brought up elsewhere than in Prince Edward Island with a decided
can-any-good-thing-come-out-of-Nazareth air. They _might_ be good
people, of course; but you were on the safe side in doubting it. She
had a special prejudice against “Yankees.” Her husband had been cheated
out of ten dollars by an employer for whom he had once worked in Boston
and neither angels nor principalities nor powers could have convinced
Mrs. Rachel that the whole United States was not responsible for it.

“Avonlea school won’t be the worse for a little new blood,” said
Marilla drily, “and if this boy is anything like his father he’ll be
all right. Steve Irving was the nicest boy that was ever raised in
these parts, though some people did call him proud. I should think Mrs.
Irving would be very glad to have the child. She has been very lonesome
since her husband died.”

“Oh, the boy may be well enough, but he’ll be different from Avonlea
children,” said Mrs. Rachel, as if that clinched the matter. Mrs.
Rachel’s opinions concerning any person, place, or thing, were always
warranted to wear. “What’s this I hear about your going to start up a
Village Improvement Society, Anne?”

“I was just talking it over with some of the girls and boys at the last
Debating Club,” said Anne, flushing. “They thought it would be rather
nice . . . and so do Mr. and Mrs. Allan. Lots of villages have them
now.”

“Well, you’ll get into no end of hot water if you do. Better leave it
alone, Anne, that’s what. People don’t like being improved.”

“Oh, we are not going to try to improve the _people_. It is Avonlea
itself. There are lots of things which might be done to make it
prettier. For instance, if we could coax Mr. Levi Boulter to pull down
that dreadful old house on his upper farm wouldn’t that be an
improvement?”

“It certainly would,” admitted Mrs. Rachel. “That old ruin has been an
eyesore to the settlement for years. But if you Improvers can coax Levi
Boulter to do anything for the public that he isn’t to be paid for
doing, may I be there to see and hear the process, that’s what. I don’t
want to discourage you, Anne, for there may be something in your idea,
though I suppose you did get it out of some rubbishy Yankee magazine;
but you’ll have your hands full with your school and I advise you as a
friend not to bother with your improvements, that’s what. But there, I
know you’ll go ahead with it if you’ve set your mind on it. You were
always one to carry a thing through somehow.”

Something about the firm outlines of Anne’s lips told that Mrs. Rachel
was not far astray in this estimate. Anne’s heart was bent on forming
the Improvement Society. Gilbert Blythe, who was to teach in White
Sands but would always be home from Friday night to Monday morning, was
enthusiastic about it; and most of the other folks were willing to go
in for anything that meant occasional meetings and consequently some
“fun.” As for what the “improvements” were to be, nobody had any very
clear idea except Anne and Gilbert. They had talked them over and
planned them out until an ideal Avonlea existed in their minds, if
nowhere else.

Mrs. Rachel had still another item of news.

“They’ve given the Carmody school to a Priscilla Grant. Didn’t you go
to Queen’s with a girl of that name, Anne?”

“Yes, indeed. Priscilla to teach at Carmody! How perfectly lovely!”
exclaimed Anne, her gray eyes lighting up until they looked like
evening stars, causing Mrs. Lynde to wonder anew if she would ever get
it settled to her satisfaction whether Anne Shirley were really a
pretty girl or not.




 II
Selling in Haste and Repenting at Leisure


Anne drove over to Carmody on a shopping expedition the next afternoon
and took Diana Barry with her. Diana was, of course, a pledged member
of the Improvement Society, and the two girls talked about little else
all the way to Carmody and back.

“The very first thing we ought to do when we get started is to have
that hall painted,” said Diana, as they drove past the Avonlea hall, a
rather shabby building set down in a wooded hollow, with spruce trees
hooding it about on all sides. “It’s a disgraceful looking place and we
must attend to it even before we try to get Mr. Levi Boulder to pull
his house down. Father says we’ll never succeed in doing _that_ . . .
Levi Boulter is too mean to spend the time it would take.”

“Perhaps he’ll let the boys take it down if they promise to haul the
boards and split them up for him for kindling wood,” said Anne
hopefully. “We must do our best and be content to go slowly at first.
We can’t expect to improve everything all at once. We’ll have to
educate public sentiment first, of course.”

Diana wasn’t exactly sure what educating public sentiment meant; but it
sounded fine and she felt rather proud that she was going to belong to
a society with such an aim in view.

“I thought of something last night that we could do, Anne. You know
that three-cornered piece of ground where the roads from Carmody and
Newbridge and White Sands meet? It’s all grown over with young spruce;
but wouldn’t it be nice to have them all cleared out, and just leave
the two or three birch trees that are on it?”

“Splendid,” agreed Anne gaily. “And have a rustic seat put under the
birches. And when spring comes we’ll have a flower-bed made in the
middle of it and plant geraniums.”

“Yes; only we’ll have to devise some way of getting old Mrs. Hiram
Sloane to keep her cow off the road, or she’ll eat our geraniums up,”
laughed Diana. “I begin to see what you mean by educating public
sentiment, Anne. There’s the old Boulter house now. Did you ever see
such a rookery? And perched right close to the road too. An old house
with its windows gone always makes me think of something dead with its
eyes picked out.”

“I think an old, deserted house is such a sad sight,” said Anne
dreamily. “It always seems to me to be thinking about its past and
mourning for its old-time joys. Marilla says that a large family was
raised in that old house long ago, and that it was a real pretty place,
with a lovely garden and roses climbing all over it. It was full of
little children and laughter and songs; and now it is empty, and
nothing ever wanders through it but the wind. How lonely and sorrowful
it must feel! Perhaps they all come back on moonlit nights . . . the
ghosts of the little children of long ago and the roses and the songs .
. . and for a little while the old house can dream it is young and
joyous again.”

Diana shook her head.

“I never imagine things like that about places now, Anne. Don’t you
remember how cross mother and Marilla were when we imagined ghosts into
the Haunted Wood? To this day I can’t go through that bush comfortably
after dark; and if I began imagining such things about the old Boulter
house I’d be frightened to pass it too. Besides, those children aren’t
dead. They’re all grown up and doing well . . . and one of them is a
butcher. And flowers and songs couldn’t have ghosts anyhow.”

Anne smothered a little sigh. She loved Diana dearly and they had
always been good comrades. But she had long ago learned that when she
wandered into the realm of fancy she must go alone. The way to it was
by an enchanted path where not even her dearest might follow her.

A thunder-shower came up while the girls were at Carmody; it did not
last long, however, and the drive home, through lanes where the
raindrops sparkled on the boughs and little leafy valleys where the
drenched ferns gave out spicy odors, was delightful. But just as they
turned into the Cuthbert lane Anne saw something that spoiled the
beauty of the landscape for her.

Before them on the right extended Mr. Harrison’s broad, gray-green
field of late oats, wet and luxuriant; and there, standing squarely in
the middle of it, up to her sleek sides in the lush growth, and
blinking at them calmly over the intervening tassels, was a Jersey cow!

Anne dropped the reins and stood up with a tightening of the lips that
boded no good to the predatory quadruped. Not a word said she, but she
climbed nimbly down over the wheels, and whisked across the fence
before Diana understood what had happened.

“Anne, come back,” shrieked the latter, as soon as she found her voice.
“You’ll ruin your dress in that wet grain . . . ruin it. She doesn’t
hear me! Well, she’ll never get that cow out by herself. I must go and
help her, of course.”

Anne was charging through the grain like a mad thing. Diana hopped
briskly down, tied the horse securely to a post, turned the skirt of
her pretty gingham dress over her shoulders, mounted the fence, and
started in pursuit of her frantic friend. She could run faster than
Anne, who was hampered by her clinging and drenched skirt, and soon
overtook her. Behind them they left a trail that would break Mr.
Harrison’s heart when he should see it.

“Anne, for mercy’s sake, stop,” panted poor Diana. “I’m right out of
breath and you are wet to the skin.”

“I must . . . get . . . that cow . . . out . . . before . . . Mr.
Harrison . . . sees her,” gasped Anne. “I don’t . . . care . . . if I’m
. . . drowned . . . if we . . . can . . . only . . . do that.”

But the Jersey cow appeared to see no good reason for being hustled out
of her luscious browsing ground. No sooner had the two breathless girls
got near her than she turned and bolted squarely for the opposite
corner of the field.

“Head her off,” screamed Anne. “Run, Diana, run.”

Diana did run. Anne tried to, and the wicked Jersey went around the
field as if she were possessed. Privately, Diana thought she was. It
was fully ten minutes before they headed her off and drove her through
the corner gap into the Cuthbert lane.

There is no denying that Anne was in anything but an angelic temper at
that precise moment. Nor did it soothe her in the least to behold a
buggy halted just outside the lane, wherein sat Mr. Shearer of Carmody
and his son, both of whom wore a broad smile.

“I guess you’d better have sold me that cow when I wanted to buy her
last week, Anne,” chuckled Mr. Shearer.

“I’ll sell her to you now, if you want her,” said her flushed and
disheveled owner. “You may have her this very minute.”

“Done. I’ll give you twenty for her as I offered before, and Jim here
can drive her right over to Carmody. She’ll go to town with the rest of
the shipment this evening. Mr. Reed of Brighton wants a Jersey cow.”

Five minutes later Jim Shearer and the Jersey cow were marching up the
road, and impulsive Anne was driving along the Green Gables lane with
her twenty dollars.

“What will Marilla say?” asked Diana.

“Oh, she won’t care. Dolly was my own cow and it isn’t likely she’d
bring more than twenty dollars at the auction. But oh dear, if Mr.
Harrison sees that grain he will know she has been in again, and after
my giving him my word of honor that I’d never let it happen! Well, it
has taught me a lesson not to give my word of honor about cows. A cow
that could jump over or break through our milk-pen fence couldn’t be
trusted anywhere.”

Marilla had gone down to Mrs. Lynde’s, and when she returned knew all
about Dolly’s sale and transfer, for Mrs. Lynde had seen most of the
transaction from her window and guessed the rest.

“I suppose it’s just as well she’s gone, though you _do_ do things in a
dreadful headlong fashion, Anne. I don’t see how she got out of the
pen, though. She must have broken some of the boards off.”

“I didn’t think of looking,” said Anne, “but I’ll go and see now.
Martin has never come back yet. Perhaps some more of his aunts have
died. I think it’s something like Mr. Peter Sloane and the
octogenarians. The other evening Mrs. Sloane was reading a newspaper
and she said to Mr. Sloane, ‘I see here that another octogenarian has
just died. What is an octogenarian, Peter?’ And Mr. Sloane said he
didn’t know, but they must be very sickly creatures, for you never
heard tell of them but they were dying. That’s the way with Martin’s
aunts.”

“Martin’s just like all the rest of those French,” said Marilla in
disgust. “You can’t depend on them for a day.” Marilla was looking over
Anne’s Carmody purchases when she heard a shrill shriek in the
barnyard. A minute later Anne dashed into the kitchen, wringing her
hands.

“Anne Shirley, what’s the matter now?”

“Oh, Marilla, whatever shall I do? This is terrible. And it’s all my
fault. Oh, will I _ever_ learn to stop and reflect a little before
doing reckless things? Mrs. Lynde always told me I would do something
dreadful some day, and now I’ve done it!”

“Anne, you are the most exasperating girl! _What_ is it you’ve done?”

“Sold Mr. Harrison’s Jersey cow . . . the one he bought from Mr. Bell .
. . to Mr. Shearer! Dolly is out in the milking pen this very minute.”

“Anne Shirley, are you dreaming?”

“I only wish I were. There’s no dream about it, though it’s very like a
nightmare. And Mr. Harrison’s cow is in Charlottetown by this time. Oh,
Marilla, I thought I’d finished getting into scrapes, and here I am in
the very worst one I ever was in in my life. What can I do?”

“Do? There’s nothing to do, child, except go and see Mr. Harrison about
it. We can offer him our Jersey in exchange if he doesn’t want to take
the money. She is just as good as his.”

“I’m sure he’ll be awfully cross and disagreeable about it, though,”
moaned Anne.

“I daresay he will. He seems to be an irritable sort of a man. I’ll go
and explain to him if you like.”

“No, indeed, I’m not as mean as that,” exclaimed Anne. “This is all my
fault and I’m certainly not going to let you take my punishment. I’ll
go myself and I’ll go at once. The sooner it’s over the better, for it
will be terribly humiliating.”

Poor Anne got her hat and her twenty dollars and was passing out when
she happened to glance through the open pantry door. On the table
reposed a nut cake which she had baked that morning . . . a
particularly toothsome concoction iced with pink icing and adorned with
walnuts. Anne had intended it for Friday evening, when the youth of
Avonlea were to meet at Green Gables to organize the Improvement
Society. But what were they compared to the justly offended Mr.
Harrison? Anne thought that cake ought to soften the heart of any man,
especially one who had to do his own cooking, and she promptly popped
it into a box. She would take it to Mr. Harrison as a peace offering.

“That is, if he gives me a chance to say anything at all,” she thought
ruefully, as she climbed the lane fence and started on a short cut
across the fields, golden in the light of the dreamy August evening. “I
know now just how people feel who are being led to execution.”




 III
Mr. Harrison at Home


Mr. Harrison’s house was an old-fashioned, low-eaved, whitewashed
structure, set against a thick spruce grove.

Mr. Harrison himself was sitting on his vineshaded veranda, in his
shirt sleeves, enjoying his evening pipe. When he realized who was
coming up the path he sprang suddenly to his feet, bolted into the
house, and shut the door. This was merely the uncomfortable result of
his surprise, mingled with a good deal of shame over his outburst of
temper the day before. But it nearly swept the remnant of her courage
from Anne’s heart.

“If he’s so cross now what will he be when he hears what I’ve done,”
she reflected miserably, as she rapped at the door.

But Mr. Harrison opened it, smiling sheepishly, and invited her to
enter in a tone quite mild and friendly, if somewhat nervous. He had
laid aside his pipe and donned his coat; he offered Anne a very dusty
chair very politely, and her reception would have passed off pleasantly
enough if it had not been for the telltale of a parrot who was peering
through the bars of his cage with wicked golden eyes. No sooner had
Anne seated herself than Ginger exclaimed,

“Bless my soul, what’s that redheaded snippet coming here for?”

It would be hard to say whose face was the redder, Mr. Harrison’s or
Anne’s.

“Don’t you mind that parrot,” said Mr. Harrison, casting a furious
glance at Ginger. “He’s . . . he’s always talking nonsense. I got him
from my brother who was a sailor. Sailors don’t always use the choicest
language, and parrots are very imitative birds.”

“So I should think,” said poor Anne, the remembrance of her errand
quelling her resentment. She couldn’t afford to snub Mr. Harrison under
the circumstances, that was certain. When you had just sold a man’s
Jersey cow offhand, without his knowledge or consent you must not mind
if his parrot repeated uncomplimentary things. Nevertheless, the
“redheaded snippet” was not quite so meek as she might otherwise have
been.

“I’ve come to confess something to you, Mr. Harrison,” she said
resolutely. “It’s . . . it’s about . . . that Jersey cow.”

“Bless my soul,” exclaimed Mr. Harrison nervously, “has she gone and
broken into my oats again? Well, never mind . . . never mind if she
has. It’s no difference . . . none at all, I . . . I was too hasty
yesterday, that’s a fact. Never mind if she has.”

“Oh, if it were only that,” sighed Anne. “But it’s ten times worse. I
don’t . . .”

“Bless my soul, do you mean to say she’s got into my wheat?”

“No . . . no . . . not the wheat. But . . .”

“Then it’s the cabbages! She’s broken into my cabbages that I was
raising for Exhibition, hey?”

“It’s _not_ the cabbages, Mr. Harrison. I’ll tell you everything . . .
that is what I came for—but please don’t interrupt me. It makes me so
nervous. Just let me tell my story and don’t say anything till I get
through—and then no doubt you’ll say plenty,” Anne concluded, but in
thought only.

“I won’t say another word,” said Mr. Harrison, and he didn’t. But
Ginger was not bound by any contract of silence and kept ejaculating,
“Redheaded snippet” at intervals until Anne felt quite wild.

“I shut my Jersey cow up in our pen yesterday. This morning I went to
Carmody and when I came back I saw a Jersey cow in your oats. Diana and
I chased her out and you can’t imagine what a hard time we had. I was
so dreadfully wet and tired and vexed—and Mr. Shearer came by that very
minute and offered to buy the cow. I sold her to him on the spot for
twenty dollars. It was wrong of me. I should have waited and consulted
Marilla, of course. But I’m dreadfully given to doing things without
thinking—everybody who knows me will tell you that. Mr. Shearer took
the cow right away to ship her on the afternoon train.”

“Redheaded snippet,” quoted Ginger in a tone of profound contempt.

At this point Mr. Harrison arose and, with an expression that would
have struck terror into any bird but a parrot, carried Ginger’s cage
into an adjoining room and shut the door. Ginger shrieked, swore, and
otherwise conducted himself in keeping with his reputation, but finding
himself left alone, relapsed into sulky silence.

“Excuse me and go on,” said Mr. Harrison, sitting down again. “My
brother the sailor never taught that bird any manners.”

“I went home and after tea I went out to the milking pen. Mr.
Harrison,” . . . Anne leaned forward, clasping her hands with her old
childish gesture, while her big gray eyes gazed imploringly into Mr.
Harrison’s embarrassed face . . . “I found my cow still shut up in the
pen. It was _your_ cow I had sold to Mr. Shearer.”

“Bless my soul,” exclaimed Mr. Harrison, in blank amazement at this
unlooked-for conclusion. “What a _very_ extraordinary thing!”

“Oh, it isn’t in the least extraordinary that I should be getting
myself and other people into scrapes,” said Anne mournfully. “I’m noted
for that. You might suppose I’d have grown out of it by this time . . .
I’ll be seventeen next March . . . but it seems that I haven’t. Mr.
Harrison, is it too much to hope that you’ll forgive me? I’m afraid
it’s too late to get your cow back, but here is the money for her . . .
or you can have mine in exchange if you’d rather. She’s a very good
cow. And I can’t express how sorry I am for it all.”

“Tut, tut,” said Mr. Harrison briskly, “don’t say another word about
it, miss. It’s of no consequence . . . no consequence whatever.
Accidents will happen. I’m too hasty myself sometimes, miss . . . far
too hasty. But I can’t help speaking out just what I think and folks
must take me as they find me. If that cow had been in my cabbages now .
. . but never mind, she wasn’t, so it’s all right. I think I’d rather
have your cow in exchange, since you want to be rid of her.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Harrison. I’m so glad you are not vexed. I was
afraid you would be.”

“And I suppose you were scared to death to come here and tell me, after
the fuss I made yesterday, hey? But you mustn’t mind me, I’m a terrible
outspoken old fellow, that’s all . . . awful apt to tell the truth, no
matter if it is a bit plain.”

“So is Mrs. Lynde,” said Anne, before she could prevent herself.

“Who? Mrs. Lynde? Don’t you tell me I’m like that old gossip,” said Mr.
Harrison irritably. “I’m not . . . not a bit. What have you got in that
box?”

“A cake,” said Anne archly. In her relief at Mr. Harrison’s unexpected
amiability her spirits soared upward feather-light. “I brought it over
for you . . . I thought perhaps you didn’t have cake very often.”

“I don’t, that’s a fact, and I’m mighty fond of it, too. I’m much
obliged to you. It looks good on top. I hope it’s good all the way
through.”

“It is,” said Anne, gaily confident. “I have made cakes in my time that
were _not_, as Mrs. Allan could tell you, but this one is all right. I
made it for the Improvement Society, but I can make another for them.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, miss, you must help me eat it. I’ll put the
kettle on and we’ll have a cup of tea. How will that do?”

“Will you let me make the tea?” said Anne dubiously.

Mr. Harrison chuckled.

“I see you haven’t much confidence in my ability to make tea. You’re
wrong . . . I can brew up as good a jorum of tea as you ever drank. But
go ahead yourself. Fortunately it rained last Sunday, so there’s plenty
of clean dishes.”

Anne hopped briskly up and went to work. She washed the teapot in
several waters before she put the tea to steep. Then she swept the
stove and set the table, bringing the dishes out of the pantry. The
state of that pantry horrified Anne, but she wisely said nothing. Mr.
Harrison told her where to find the bread and butter and a can of
peaches. Anne adorned the table with a bouquet from the garden and shut
her eyes to the stains on the tablecloth. Soon the tea was ready and
Anne found herself sitting opposite Mr. Harrison at his own table,
pouring his tea for him, and chatting freely to him about her school
and friends and plans. She could hardly believe the evidence of her
senses.

Mr. Harrison had brought Ginger back, averring that the poor bird would
be lonesome; and Anne, feeling that she could forgive everybody and
everything, offered him a walnut. But Ginger’s feelings had been
grievously hurt and he rejected all overtures of friendship. He sat
moodily on his perch and ruffled his feathers up until he looked like a
mere ball of green and gold.

“Why do you call him Ginger?” asked Anne, who liked appropriate names
and thought Ginger accorded not at all with such gorgeous plumage.

“My brother the sailor named him. Maybe it had some reference to his
temper. I think a lot of that bird though . . . you’d be surprised if
you knew how much. He has his faults of course. That bird has cost me a
good deal one way and another. Some people object to his swearing
habits but he can’t be broken of them. I’ve tried . . . other people
have tried. Some folks have prejudices against parrots. Silly, ain’t
it? I like them myself. Ginger’s a lot of company to me. Nothing would
induce me to give that bird up . . . nothing in the world, miss.”

Mr. Harrison flung the last sentence at Anne as explosively as if he
suspected her of some latent design of persuading him to give Ginger
up. Anne, however, was beginning to like the queer, fussy, fidgety
little man, and before the meal was over they were quite good friends.
Mr. Harrison found out about the Improvement Society and was disposed
to approve of it.

“That’s right. Go ahead. There’s lots of room for improvement in this
settlement . . . and in the people too.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” flashed Anne. To herself, or to her particular
cronies, she might admit that there were some small imperfections,
easily removable, in Avonlea and its inhabitants. But to hear a
practical outsider like Mr. Harrison saying it was an entirely
different thing. “I think Avonlea is a lovely place; and the people in
it are very nice, too.”

“I guess you’ve got a spice of temper,” commented Mr. Harrison,
surveying the flushed cheeks and indignant eyes opposite him. “It goes
with hair like yours, I reckon. Avonlea is a pretty decent place or I
wouldn’t have located here; but I suppose even you will admit that it
has _some_ faults?”

“I like it all the better for them,” said loyal Anne. “I don’t like
places or people either that haven’t any faults. I think a truly
perfect person would be very uninteresting. Mrs. Milton White says she
never met a perfect person, but she’s heard enough about one . . . her
husband’s first wife. Don’t you think it must be very uncomfortable to
be married to a man whose first wife was perfect?”

“It would be more uncomfortable to be married to the perfect wife,”
declared Mr. Harrison, with a sudden and inexplicable warmth.

When tea was over Anne insisted on washing the dishes, although Mr.
Harrison assured her that there were enough in the house to do for
weeks yet. She would dearly have loved to sweep the floor also, but no
broom was visible and she did not like to ask where it was for fear
there wasn’t one at all.

“You might run across and talk to me once in a while,” suggested Mr.
Harrison when she was leaving. “’Tisn’t far and folks ought to be
neighborly. I’m kind of interested in that society of yours. Seems to
me there’ll be some fun in it. Who are you going to tackle first?”

“We are not going to meddle with _people_ . . . it is only _places_ we
mean to improve,” said Anne, in a dignified tone. She rather suspected
that Mr. Harrison was making fun of the project.

When she had gone Mr. Harrison watched her from the window . . . a
lithe, girlish shape, tripping lightheartedly across the fields in the
sunset afterglow.

“I’m a crusty, lonesome, crabbed old chap,” he said aloud, “but there’s
something about that little girl makes me feel young again . . . and
it’s such a pleasant sensation I’d like to have it repeated once in a
while.”

“Redheaded snippet,” croaked Ginger mockingly.

Mr. Harrison shook his fist at the parrot.

“You ornery bird,” he muttered, “I almost wish I’d wrung your neck when
my brother the sailor brought you home. Will you never be done getting
me into trouble?”

Anne ran home blithely and recounted her adventures to Marilla, who had
been not a little alarmed by her long absence and was on the point of
starting out to look for her.

“It’s a pretty good world, after all, isn’t it, Marilla?” concluded
Anne happily. “Mrs. Lynde was complaining the other day that it wasn’t
much of a world. She said whenever you looked forward to anything
pleasant you were sure to be more or less disappointed . . . perhaps
that is true. But there is a good side to it too. The bad things don’t
always come up to your expectations either . . . they nearly always
turn out ever so much better than you think. I looked forward to a
dreadfully unpleasant experience when I went over to Mr. Harrison’s
tonight; and instead he was quite kind and I had almost a nice time. I
think we’re going to be real good friends if we make plenty of
allowances for each other, and everything has turned out for the best.
But all the same, Marilla, I shall certainly never again sell a cow
before making sure to whom she belongs. And I do _not_ like parrots!”




 IV
Different Opinions


One evening at sunset, Jane Andrews, Gilbert Blythe, and Anne Shirley
were lingering by a fence in the shadow of gently swaying spruce
boughs, where a wood cut known as the Birch Path joined the main road.
Jane had been up to spend the afternoon with Anne, who walked part of
the way home with her; at the fence they met Gilbert, and all three
were now talking about the fateful morrow; for that morrow was the
first of September and the schools would open. Jane would go to
Newbridge and Gilbert to White Sands.

“You both have the advantage of me,” sighed Anne. “You’re going to
teach children who don’t know you, but I have to teach my own old
schoolmates, and Mrs. Lynde says she’s afraid they won’t respect me as
they would a stranger unless I’m very cross from the first. But I don’t
believe a teacher should be cross. Oh, it seems to me such a
responsibility!”

“I guess we’ll get on all right,” said Jane comfortably. Jane was not
troubled by any aspirations to be an influence for good. She meant to
earn her salary fairly, please the trustees, and get her name on the
School Inspector’s roll of honor. Further ambitions Jane had none. “The
main thing will be to keep order and a teacher has to be a little cross
to do that. If my pupils won’t do as I tell them I shall punish them.”

“How?”

“Give them a good whipping, of course.”

“Oh, Jane, you wouldn’t,” cried Anne, shocked. “Jane, you _couldn’t!_”

“Indeed, I could and would, if they deserved it,” said Jane decidedly.

“I could _never_ whip a child,” said Anne with equal decision. “I don’t
believe in it _at all_. Miss Stacy never whipped any of us and she had
perfect order; and Mr. Phillips was always whipping and he had no order
at all. No, if I can’t get along without whipping I shall not try to
teach school. There are better ways of managing. I shall try to win my
pupils’ affections and then they will _want_ to do what I tell them.”

“But suppose they don’t?” said practical Jane.

“I wouldn’t whip them anyhow. I’m sure it wouldn’t do any good. Oh,
don’t whip your pupils, Jane dear, no matter what they do.”

“What do you think about it, Gilbert?” demanded Jane. “Don’t you think
there are some children who really need a whipping now and then?”

“Don’t you think it’s a cruel, barbarous thing to whip a child . . .
_any_ child?” exclaimed Anne, her face flushing with earnestness.

“Well,” said Gilbert slowly, torn between his real convictions and his
wish to measure up to Anne’s ideal, “there’s something to be said on
both sides. I don’t believe in whipping children _much_. I think, as
you say, Anne, that there are better ways of managing as a rule, and
that corporal punishment should be a last resort. But on the other
hand, as Jane says, I believe there is an occasional child who can’t be
influenced in any other way and who, in short, needs a whipping and
would be improved by it. Corporal punishment as a last resort is to be
my rule.”

Gilbert, having tried to please both sides, succeeded, as is usual and
eminently right, in pleasing neither. Jane tossed her head.

“I’ll whip my pupils when they’re naughty. It’s the shortest and
easiest way of convincing them.”

Anne gave Gilbert a disappointed glance.

“I shall never whip a child,” she repeated firmly. “I feel sure it
isn’t either right or necessary.”

“Suppose a boy sauced you back when you told him to do something?” said
Jane.

“I’d keep him in after school and talk kindly and firmly to him,” said
Anne. “There is some good in every person if you can find it. It is a
teacher’s duty to find and develop it. That is what our School
Management professor at Queen’s told us, you know. Do you suppose you
could find any good in a child by whipping him? It’s far more important
to influence the children aright than it is even to teach them the
three R’s, Professor Rennie says.”

“But the Inspector examines them in the three R’s, mind you, and he
won’t give you a good report if they don’t come up to his standard,”
protested Jane.

“I’d rather have my pupils love me and look back to me in after years
as a real helper than be on the roll of honor,” asserted Anne
decidedly.

“Wouldn’t you punish children at all, when they misbehaved?” asked
Gilbert.

“Oh, yes, I suppose I shall have to, although I know I’ll hate to do
it. But you can keep them in at recess or stand them on the floor or
give them lines to write.”

“I suppose you won’t punish the girls by making them sit with the
boys?” said Jane slyly.

Gilbert and Anne looked at each other and smiled rather foolishly. Once
upon a time, Anne had been made to sit with Gilbert for punishment and
sad and bitter had been the consequences thereof.

“Well, time will tell which is the best way,” said Jane philosophically
as they parted.

Anne went back to Green Gables by way of Birch Path, shadowy, rustling,
fern-scented, through Violet Vale and past Willowmere, where dark and
light kissed each other under the firs, and down through Lover’s Lane .
. . spots she and Diana had so named long ago. She walked slowly,
enjoying the sweetness of wood and field and the starry summer
twilight, and thinking soberly about the new duties she was to take up
on the morrow. When she reached the yard at Green Gables Mrs. Lynde’s
loud, decided tones floated out through the open kitchen window.

“Mrs. Lynde has come up to give me good advice about tomorrow,” thought
Anne with a grimace, “but I don’t believe I’ll go in. Her advice is
much like pepper, I think . . . excellent in small quantities but
rather scorching in her doses. I’ll run over and have a chat with Mr.
Harrison instead.”

This was not the first time Anne had run over and chatted with Mr.
Harrison since the notable affair of the Jersey cow. She had been there
several evenings and Mr. Harrison and she were very good friends,
although there were times and seasons when Anne found the outspokenness
on which he prided himself rather trying. Ginger still continued to
regard her with suspicion, and never failed to greet her sarcastically
as “redheaded snippet.” Mr. Harrison had tried vainly to break him of
the habit by jumping excitedly up whenever he saw Anne coming and
exclaiming,

“Bless my soul, here’s that pretty little girl again,” or something
equally flattering. But Ginger saw through the scheme and scorned it.
Anne was never to know how many compliments Mr. Harrison paid her
behind her back. He certainly never paid her any to her face.

“Well, I suppose you’ve been back in the woods laying in a supply of
switches for tomorrow?” was his greeting as Anne came up the veranda
steps.

“No, indeed,” said Anne indignantly. She was an excellent target for
teasing because she always took things so seriously. “I shall never
have a switch in my school, Mr. Harrison. Of course, I shall have to
have a pointer, but I shall use it for pointing _only_.”

“So you mean to strap them instead? Well, I don’t know but you’re
right. A switch stings more at the time but the strap smarts longer,
that’s a fact.”

“I shall not use anything of the sort. I’m not going to whip my
pupils.”

“Bless my soul,” exclaimed Mr. Harrison in genuine astonishment, “how
do you lay out to keep order then?”

“I shall govern by affection, Mr. Harrison.”

“It won’t do,” said Mr. Harrison, “won’t do at all, Anne. ‘Spare the
rod and spoil the child.’ When I went to school the master whipped me
regular every day because he said if I wasn’t in mischief just then I
was plotting it.”

“Methods have changed since your schooldays, Mr. Harrison.”

“But human nature hasn’t. Mark my words, you’ll never manage the young
fry unless you keep a rod in pickle for them. The thing is impossible.”

“Well, I’m going to try my way first,” said Anne, who had a fairly
strong will of her own and was apt to cling very tenaciously to her
theories.

“You’re pretty stubborn, I reckon,” was Mr. Harrison’s way of putting
it. “Well, well, we’ll see. Someday when you get riled up . . . and
people with hair like yours are desperate apt to get riled . . . you’ll
forget all your pretty little notions and give some of them a whaling.
You’re too young to be teaching anyhow . . . far too young and
childish.”

Altogether, Anne went to bed that night in a rather pessimistic mood.
She slept poorly and was so pale and tragic at breakfast next morning
that Marilla was alarmed and insisted on making her take a cup of
scorching ginger tea. Anne sipped it patiently, although she could not
imagine what good ginger tea would do. Had it been some magic brew,
potent to confer age and experience, Anne would have swallowed a quart
of it without flinching.

“Marilla, what if I fail!”

“You’ll hardly fail completely in one day and there’s plenty more days
coming,” said Marilla. “The trouble with you, Anne, is that you’ll
expect to teach those children everything and reform all their faults
right off, and if you can’t you’ll think you’ve failed.”




 V
A Full-fledged Schoolma’am


When Anne reached the school that morning . . . for the first time in
her life she had traversed the Birch Path deaf and blind to its
beauties . . . all was quiet and still. The preceding teacher had
trained the children to be in their places at her arrival, and when
Anne entered the schoolroom she was confronted by prim rows of “shining
morning faces” and bright, inquisitive eyes. She hung up her hat and
faced her pupils, hoping that she did not look as frightened and
foolish as she felt and that they would not perceive how she was
trembling.

She had sat up until nearly twelve the preceding night composing a
speech she meant to make to her pupils upon opening the school. She had
revised and improved it painstakingly, and then she had learned it off
by heart. It was a very good speech and had some very fine ideas in it,
especially about mutual help and earnest striving after knowledge. The
only trouble was that she could not now remember a word of it.

After what seemed to her a year . . . about ten seconds in reality . .
. she said faintly, “Take your Testaments, please,” and sank
breathlessly into her chair under cover of the rustle and clatter of
desk lids that followed. While the children read their verses Anne
marshalled her shaky wits into order and looked over the array of
little pilgrims to the Grownup Land.

Most of them were, of course, quite well known to her. Her own
classmates had passed out in the preceding year but the rest had all
gone to school with her, excepting the primer class and ten newcomers
to Avonlea. Anne secretly felt more interest in these ten than in those
whose possibilities were already fairly well mapped out to her. To be
sure, they might be just as commonplace as the rest; but on the other
hand there _might_ be a genius among them. It was a thrilling idea.

Sitting by himself at a corner desk was Anthony Pye. He had a dark,
sullen little face, and was staring at Anne with a hostile expression
in his black eyes. Anne instantly made up her mind that she would win
that boy’s affection and discomfit the Pyes utterly.

In the other corner another strange boy was sitting with Arty Sloane. .
. a jolly looking little chap, with a snub nose, freckled face, and
big, light blue eyes, fringed with whitish lashes . . . probably the
Don_nell_ boy; and if resemblance went for anything, his sister was
sitting across the aisle with Mary Bell. Anne wondered what sort of
mother the child had, to send her to school dressed as she was. She
wore a faded pink silk dress, trimmed with a great deal of cotton lace,
soiled white kid slippers, and silk stockings. Her sandy hair was
tortured into innumerable kinky and unnatural curls, surmounted by a
flamboyant bow of pink ribbon bigger than her head. Judging from her
expression she was very well satisfied with herself.

A pale little thing, with smooth ripples of fine, silky, fawn-colored
hair flowing over her shoulders, must, Anne thought, be Annetta Bell,
whose parents had formerly lived in the Newbridge school district, but,
by reason of hauling their house fifty yards north of its old site were
now in Avonlea. Three pallid little girls crowded into one seat were
certainly Cottons; and there was no doubt that the small beauty with
the long brown curls and hazel eyes, who was casting coquettish looks
at Jack Gills over the edge of her Testament, was Prillie Rogerson,
whose father had recently married a second wife and brought Prillie
home from her grandmother’s in Grafton. A tall, awkward girl in a back
seat, who seemed to have too many feet and hands, Anne could not place
at all, but later on discovered that her name was Barbara Shaw and that
she had come to live with an Avonlea aunt. She was also to find that if
Barbara ever managed to walk down the aisle without falling over her
own or somebody else’s feet the Avonlea scholars wrote the unusual fact
up on the porch wall to commemorate it.

But when Anne’s eyes met those of the boy at the front desk facing her
own, a queer little thrill went over her, as if she had found her
genius. She knew this must be Paul Irving and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde
had been right for once when she prophesied that he would be unlike the
Avonlea children. More than that, Anne realized that he was unlike
other children anywhere, and that there was a soul subtly akin to her
own gazing at her out of the very dark blue eyes that were watching her
so intently.

She knew Paul was ten but he looked no more than eight. He had the most
beautiful little face she had ever seen in a child . . . features of
exquisite delicacy and refinement, framed in a halo of chestnut curls.
His mouth was delicious, being full without pouting, the crimson lips
just softly touching and curving into finely finished little corners
that narrowly escaped being dimpled. He had a sober, grave, meditative
expression, as if his spirit was much older than his body; but when
Anne smiled softly at him it vanished in a sudden answering smile,
which seemed an illumination of his whole being, as if some lamp had
suddenly kindled into flame inside of him, irradiating him from top to
toe. Best of all, it was involuntary, born of no external effort or
motive, but simply the outflashing of a hidden personality, rare and
fine and sweet. With a quick interchange of smiles Anne and Paul were
fast friends forever before a word had passed between them.

The day went by like a dream. Anne could never clearly recall it
afterwards. It almost seemed as if it were not she who was teaching but
somebody else. She heard classes and worked sums and set copies
mechanically. The children behaved quite well; only two cases of
discipline occurred. Morley Andrews was caught driving a pair of
trained crickets in the aisle. Anne stood Morley on the platform for an
hour and . . . which Morley felt much more keenly . . . confiscated his
crickets. She put them in a box and on the way from school set them
free in Violet Vale; but Morley believed, then and ever afterwards,
that she took them home and kept them for her own amusement.

The other culprit was Anthony Pye, who poured the last drops of water
from his slate bottle down the back of Aurelia Clay’s neck. Anne kept
Anthony in at recess and talked to him about what was expected of
gentlemen, admonishing him that they never poured water down ladies’
necks. She wanted all her boys to be gentlemen, she said. Her little
lecture was quite kind and touching; but unfortunately Anthony remained
absolutely untouched. He listened to her in silence, with the same
sullen expression, and whistled scornfully as he went out. Anne sighed;
and then cheered herself up by remembering that winning a Pye’s
affections, like the building of Rome, wasn’t the work of a day. In
fact, it was doubtful whether some of the Pyes had any affections to
win; but Anne hoped better things of Anthony, who looked as if he might
be a rather nice boy if one ever got behind his sullenness.

When school was dismissed and the children had gone Anne dropped
wearily into her chair. Her head ached and she felt woefully
discouraged. There was no real reason for discouragement, since nothing
very dreadful had occurred; but Anne was very tired and inclined to
believe that she would never learn to like teaching. And how terrible
it would be to be doing something you didn’t like every day for . . .
well, say forty years. Anne was of two minds whether to have her cry
out then and there, or wait till she was safely in her own white room
at home. Before she could decide there was a click of heels and a
silken swish on the porch floor, and Anne found herself confronted by a
lady whose appearance made her recall a recent criticism of Mr.
Harrison’s on an overdressed female he had seen in a Charlottetown
store. “She looked like a head-on collision between a fashion plate and
a nightmare.”

The newcomer was gorgeously arrayed in a pale blue summer silk, puffed,
frilled, and shirred wherever puff, frill, or shirring could possibly
be placed. Her head was surmounted by a huge white chiffon hat,
bedecked with three long but rather stringy ostrich feathers. A veil of
pink chiffon, lavishly sprinkled with huge black dots, hung like a
flounce from the hat brim to her shoulders and floated off in two airy
streamers behind her. She wore all the jewelry that could be crowded on
one small woman, and a very strong odor of perfume attended her.

“I am Mrs. Don_nell_ . . . Mrs. H. B. Don_nell_,” announced this
vision, “and I have come in to see you about something Clarice Almira
told me when she came home to dinner today. It annoyed me
_excessively_.”

“I’m sorry,” faltered Anne, vainly trying to recollect any incident of
the morning connected with the Donnell children.

“Clarice Almira told me that you pronounced our name _Don_nell. Now,
Miss Shirley, the correct pronunciation of our name is Don_nell_ . . .
accent on the last syllable. I _hope_ you’ll remember this in future.”

“I’ll try to,” gasped Anne, choking back a wild desire to laugh. “I
know by experience that it’s very unpleasant to have one’s name
_spelled_ wrong and I suppose it must be even worse to have it
pronounced wrong.”

“Certainly it is. And Clarice Almira also informed me that you call my
son Jacob.”

“He told me his name was Jacob,” protested Anne.

“I might have expected that,” said Mrs. H. B. Don_nell_, in a tone
which implied that gratitude in children was not to be looked for in
this degenerate age. “That boy has such plebeian tastes, Miss Shirley.
When he was born I wanted to call him St. Clair . . . it sounds _so_
aristocratic, doesn’t it? But his father insisted he should be called
Jacob after his uncle. I yielded, because Uncle Jacob was a rich old
bachelor. And what do you think, Miss Shirley? When our innocent boy
was five years old Uncle Jacob actually went and got married and now he
has three boys of his own. Did you ever hear of such ingratitude? The
moment the invitation to the wedding . . . for he had the impertinence
to send us an invitation, Miss Shirley . . . came to the house I said,
‘No more Jacobs for me, thank you.’ From that day I called my son St.
Clair and St. Clair I am determined he shall be called. His father
obstinately continues to call him Jacob, and the boy himself has a
perfectly unaccountable preference for the vulgar name. But St. Clair
he is and St. Clair he shall remain. You will kindly remember this,
Miss Shirley, will you not? _Thank_ you. I told Clarice Almira that I
was sure it was only a misunderstanding and that a word would set it
right. Don_nell_. . . accent on the last syllable . . . and St. Clair .
. . on _no_ account Jacob. You’ll remember? _Thank_ you.”

When Mrs. H. B. Don_nell_ had skimmed away Anne locked the school door
and went home. At the foot of the hill she found Paul Irving by the
Birch Path. He held out to her a cluster of the dainty little wild
orchids which Avonlea children called “rice lillies.”

“Please, teacher, I found these in Mr. Wright’s field,” he said shyly,
“and I came back to give them to you because I thought you were the
kind of lady that would like them, and because . . .” he lifted his big
beautiful eyes . . . “I like you, teacher.”

“You darling,” said Anne, taking the fragrant spikes. As if Paul’s
words had been a spell of magic, discouragement and weariness passed
from her spirit, and hope upwelled in her heart like a dancing
fountain. She went through the Birch Path light-footedly, attended by
the sweetness of her orchids as by a benediction.

“Well, how did you get along?” Marilla wanted to know.

“Ask me that a month later and I may be able to tell you. I can’t now .
. . I don’t know myself . . . I’m too near it. My thoughts feel as if
they had been all stirred up until they were thick and muddy. The only
thing I feel really sure of having accomplished today is that I taught
Cliffie Wright that A is A. He never knew it before. Isn’t it something
to have started a soul along a path that may end in Shakespeare and
Paradise Lost?”

Mrs. Lynde came up later on with more encouragement. That good lady had
waylaid the schoolchildren at her gate and demanded of them how they
liked their new teacher.

“And every one of them said they liked you splendid, Anne, except
Anthony Pye. I must admit he didn’t. He said you ‘weren’t any good,
just like all girl teachers.’ There’s the Pye leaven for you. But never
mind.”

“I’m not going to mind,” said Anne quietly, “and I’m going to make
Anthony Pye like me yet. Patience and kindness will surely win him.”

“Well, you can never tell about a Pye,” said Mrs. Rachel cautiously.
“They go by contraries, like dreams, often as not. As for that
_Don_nell woman, she’ll get no Don_nell_ing from me, I can assure you.
The name is _Don_nell and always has been. The woman is crazy, that’s
what. She has a pug dog she calls Queenie and it has its meals at the
table along with the family, eating off a china plate. I’d be afraid of
a judgment if I was her. Thomas says Donnell himself is a sensible,
hard-working man, but he hadn’t much gumption when he picked out a
wife, that’s what.”




 VI
All Sorts and Conditions of Men . . . and women


A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind blowing up
over the sand dunes from the sea; a long red road, winding through
fields and woods, now looping itself about a corner of thick set
spruces, now threading a plantation of young maples with great feathery
sheets of ferns beneath them, now dipping down into a hollow where a
brook flashed out of the woods and into them again, now basking in open
sunshine between ribbons of golden-rod and smoke-blue asters; air
athrill with the pipings of myriads of crickets, those glad little
pensioners of the summer hills; a plump brown pony ambling along the
road; two girls behind him, full to the lips with the simple, priceless
joy of youth and life.

“Oh, this is a day left over from Eden, isn’t it, Diana?” . . . and
Anne sighed for sheer happiness. “The air has magic in it. Look at the
purple in the cup of the harvest valley, Diana. And oh, do smell the
dying fir! It’s coming up from that little sunny hollow where Mr. Eben
Wright has been cutting fence poles. Bliss is it on such a day to be
alive; but to smell dying fir is very heaven. That’s two thirds
Wordsworth and one third Anne Shirley. It doesn’t seem possible that
there should be dying fir in heaven, does it? And yet it doesn’t seem
to me that heaven would be quite perfect if you couldn’t get a whiff of
dead fir as you went through its woods. Perhaps we’ll have the odor
there without the death. Yes, I think that will be the way. That
delicious aroma must be the souls of the firs . . . and of course it
will be just souls in heaven.”

“Trees haven’t souls,” said practical Diana, “but the smell of dead fir
is certainly lovely. I’m going to make a cushion and fill it with fir
needles. You’d better make one too, Anne.”

“I think I shall . . . and use it for my naps. I’d be certain to dream
I was a dryad or a woodnymph then. But just this minute I’m well
content to be Anne Shirley, Avonlea schoolma’am, driving over a road
like this on such a sweet, friendly day.”

“It’s a lovely day but we have anything but a lovely task before us,”
sighed Diana. “Why on earth did you offer to canvass this road, Anne?
Almost all the cranks in Avonlea live along it, and we’ll probably be
treated as if we were begging for ourselves. It’s the very worst road
of all.”

“That is why I chose it. Of course Gilbert and Fred would have taken
this road if we had asked them. But you see, Diana, I feel myself
responsible for the A.V.I.S., since I was the first to suggest it, and
it seems to me that I ought to do the most disagreeable things. I’m
sorry on your account; but you needn’t say a word at the cranky places.
I’ll do all the talking . . . Mrs. Lynde would say I was well able to.
Mrs. Lynde doesn’t know whether to approve of our enterprise or not.
She inclines to, when she remembers that Mr. and Mrs. Allan are in
favor of it; but the fact that village improvement societies first
originated in the States is a count against it. So she is halting
between two opinions and only success will justify us in Mrs. Lynde’s
eyes. Priscilla is going to write a paper for our next Improvement
meeting, and I expect it will be good, for her aunt is such a clever
writer and no doubt it runs in the family. I shall never forget the
thrill it gave me when I found out that Mrs. Charlotte E. Morgan was
Priscilla’s aunt. It seemed so wonderful that I was a friend of the
girl whose aunt wrote ‘Edgewood Days’ and ‘The Rosebud Garden.’”

“Where does Mrs. Morgan live?”

“In Toronto. And Priscilla says she is coming to the Island for a visit
next summer, and if it is possible Priscilla is going to arrange to
have us meet her. That seems almost too good to be true—but it’s
something pleasant to imagine after you go to bed.”

The Avonlea Village Improvement Society was an organized fact. Gilbert
Blythe was president, Fred Wright vice-president, Anne Shirley
secretary, and Diana Barry treasurer. The “Improvers,” as they were
promptly christened, were to meet once a fortnight at the homes of the
members. It was admitted that they could not expect to affect many
improvements so late in the season; but they meant to plan the next
summer’s campaign, collect and discuss ideas, write and read papers,
and, as Anne said, educate the public sentiment generally.

There was some disapproval, of course, and . . . which the Improvers
felt much more keenly . . . a good deal of ridicule. Mr. Elisha Wright
was reported to have said that a more appropriate name for the
organization would be Courting Club. Mrs. Hiram Sloane declared she had
heard the Improvers meant to plough up all the roadsides and set them
out with geraniums. Mr. Levi Boulter warned his neighbors that the
Improvers would insist that everybody pull down his house and rebuild
it after plans approved by the society. Mr. James Spencer sent them
word that he wished they would kindly shovel down the church hill. Eben
Wright told Anne that he wished the Improvers could induce old Josiah
Sloane to keep his whiskers trimmed. Mr. Lawrence Bell said he would
whitewash his barns if nothing else would please them but he would
_not_ hang lace curtains in the cowstable windows. Mr. Major Spencer
asked Clifton Sloane, an Improver who drove the milk to the Carmody
cheese factory, if it was true that everybody would have to have his
milk-stand hand-painted next summer and keep an embroidered centerpiece
on it.

In spite of . . . or perhaps, human nature being what it is, because of
. . . this, the Society went gamely to work at the only improvement
they could hope to bring about that fall. At the second meeting, in the
Barry parlor, Oliver Sloane moved that they start a subscription to
re-shingle and paint the hall; Julia Bell seconded it, with an uneasy
feeling that she was doing something not exactly ladylike. Gilbert put
the motion, it was carried unanimously, and Anne gravely recorded it in
her minutes. The next thing was to appoint a committee, and Gertie Pye,
determined not to let Julia Bell carry off all the laurels, boldly
moved that Miss Jane Andrews be chairman of said committee. This motion
being also duly seconded and carried, Jane returned the compliment by
appointing Gertie on the committee, along with Gilbert, Anne, Diana,
and Fred Wright. The committee chose their routes in private conclave.
Anne and Diana were told off for the Newbridge road, Gilbert and Fred
for the White Sands road, and Jane and Gertie for the Carmody road.

“Because,” explained Gilbert to Anne, as they walked home together
through the Haunted Wood, “the Pyes all live along that road and they
won’t give a cent unless one of themselves canvasses them.”

The next Saturday Anne and Diana started out. They drove to the end of
the road and canvassed homeward, calling first on the “Andrew girls.”

“If Catherine is alone we may get something,” said Diana, “but if Eliza
is there we won’t.”

Eliza was there . . . very much so . . . and looked even grimmer than
usual. Miss Eliza was one of those people who give you the impression
that life is indeed a vale of tears, and that a smile, never to speak
of a laugh, is a waste of nervous energy truly reprehensible. The
Andrew girls had been “girls” for fifty odd years and seemed likely to
remain girls to the end of their earthly pilgrimage. Catherine, it was
said, had not entirely given up hope, but Eliza, who was born a
pessimist, had never had any. They lived in a little brown house built
in a sunny corner scooped out of Mark Andrew’s beech woods. Eliza
complained that it was terrible hot in summer, but Catherine was wont
to say it was lovely and warm in winter.

Eliza was sewing patchwork, not because it was needed but simply as a
protest against the frivolous lace Catherine was crocheting. Eliza
listened with a frown and Catherine with a smile, as the girls
explained their errand. To be sure, whenever Catherine caught Eliza’s
eye she discarded the smile in guilty confusion; but it crept back the
next moment.

“If I had money to waste,” said Eliza grimly, “I’d burn it up and have
the fun of seeing a blaze maybe; but I wouldn’t give it to that hall,
not a cent. It’s no benefit to the settlement . . . just a place for
young folks to meet and carry on when they’s better be home in their
beds.”

“Oh, Eliza, young folks must have some amusement,” protested Catherine.

“I don’t see the necessity. _We_ didn’t gad about to halls and places
when we were young, Catherine Andrews. This world is getting worse
every day.”

“I think it’s getting better,” said Catherine firmly.

“_You_ think!” Miss Eliza’s voice expressed the utmost contempt. “It
doesn’t signify what you _think_, Catherine Andrews. Facts is facts.”

“Well, I always like to look on the bright side, Eliza.”

“There isn’t any bright side.”

“Oh, indeed there is,” cried Anne, who couldn’t endure such heresy in
silence. “Why, there are ever so many bright sides, Miss Andrews. It’s
really a beautiful world.”

“You won’t have such a high opinion of it when you’ve lived as long in
it as I have,” retorted Miss Eliza sourly, “and you won’t be so
enthusiastic about improving it either. How is your mother, Diana? Dear
me, but she has failed of late. She looks terrible run down. And how
long is it before Marilla expects to be stone blind, Anne?”

“The doctor thinks her eyes will not get any worse if she is very
careful,” faltered Anne.

Eliza shook her head.

“Doctors always talk like that just to keep people cheered up. I
wouldn’t have much hope if I was her. It’s best to be prepared for the
worst.”

“But oughtn’t we be prepared for the best too?” pleaded Anne. “It’s
just as likely to happen as the worst.”

“Not in my experience, and I’ve fifty-seven years to set against your
sixteen,” retorted Eliza. “Going, are you? Well, I hope this new
society of yours will be able to keep Avonlea from running any further
down hill but I haven’t much hope of it.”

Anne and Diana got themselves thankfully out, and drove away as fast as
the fat pony could go. As they rounded the curve below the beech wood a
plump figure came speeding over Mr. Andrews’ pasture, waving to them
excitedly. It was Catherine Andrews and she was so out of breath that
she could hardly speak, but she thrust a couple of quarters into Anne’s
hand.

“That’s my contribution to painting the hall,” she gasped. “I’d like to
give you a dollar but I don’t dare take more from my egg money for
Eliza would find it out if I did. I’m real interested in your society
and I believe you’re going to do a lot of good. I’m an optimist. I
_have_ to be, living with Eliza. I must hurry back before she misses me
. . . she thinks I’m feeding the hens. I hope you’ll have good luck
canvassing, and don’t be cast down over what Eliza said. The world _is_
getting better . . . it certainly is.”

The next house was Daniel Blair’s.

“Now, it all depends on whether his wife is home or not,” said Diana,
as they jolted along a deep-rutted lane. “If she is we won’t get a
cent. Everybody says Dan Blair doesn’t dare have his hair cut without
asking her permission; and it’s certain she’s very close, to state it
moderately. She says she has to be just before she’s generous. But Mrs.
Lynde says she’s so much ‘before’ that generosity never catches up with
her at all.”

Anne related their experience at the Blair place to Marilla that
evening.

“We tied the horse and then rapped at the kitchen door. Nobody came but
the door was open and we could hear somebody in the pantry, going on
dreadfully. We couldn’t make out the words but Diana says she knows
they were swearing by the sound of them. I can’t believe that of Mr.
Blair, for he is always so quiet and meek; but at least he had great
provocation, for Marilla, when that poor man came to the door, red as a
beet, with perspiration streaming down his face, he had on one of his
wife’s big gingham aprons. ‘I can’t get this durned thing off,’ he
said, ‘for the strings are tied in a hard knot and I can’t bust ’em, so
you’ll have to excuse me, ladies.’ We begged him not to mention it and
went in and sat down. Mr. Blair sat down too; he twisted the apron
around to his back and rolled it up, but he did look so ashamed and
worried that I felt sorry for him, and Diana said she feared we had
called at an inconvenient time. ‘Oh, not at all,’ said Mr. Blair,
trying to smile . . . you know he is always very polite . . . ‘I’m a
little busy . . . getting ready to bake a cake as it were. My wife got
a telegram today that her sister from Montreal is coming tonight and
she’s gone to the train to meet her and left orders for me to make a
cake for tea. She writ out the recipe and told me what to do but I’ve
clean forgot half the directions already. And it says, ‘flavor
according to taste.’ What does that mean? How can you tell? And what if
my taste doesn’t happen to be other people’s taste? Would a tablespoon
of vanilla be enough for a small layer cake?”

“I felt sorrier than ever for the poor man. He didn’t seem to be in his
proper sphere at all. I had heard of henpecked husbands and now I felt
that I saw one. It was on my lips to say, ‘Mr. Blair, if you’ll give us
a subscription for the hall I’ll mix up your cake for you.’ But I
suddenly thought it wouldn’t be neighborly to drive too sharp a bargain
with a fellow creature in distress. So I offered to mix the cake for
him without any conditions at all. He just jumped at my offer. He said
he’d been used to making his own bread before he was married but he
feared cake was beyond him, and yet he hated to disappoint his wife. He
got me another apron, and Diana beat the eggs and I mixed the cake. Mr.
Blair ran about and got us the materials. He had forgotten all about
his apron and when he ran it streamed out behind him and Diana said she
thought she would die to see it. He said he could bake the cake all
right . . . he was used to that . . . and then he asked for our list
and he put down four dollars. So you see we were rewarded. But even if
he hadn’t given a cent I’d always feel that we had done a truly
Christian act in helping him.”

Theodore White’s was the next stopping place. Neither Anne nor Diana
had ever been there before, and they had only a very slight
acquaintance with Mrs. Theodore, who was not given to hospitality.
Should they go to the back or front door? While they held a whispered
consultation Mrs. Theodore appeared at the front door with an armful of
newspapers. Deliberately she laid them down one by one on the porch
floor and the porch steps, and then down the path to the very feet of
her mystified callers.

“Will you please wipe your feet carefully on the grass and then walk on
these papers?” she said anxiously. “I’ve just swept the house all over
and I can’t have any more dust tracked in. The path’s been real muddy
since the rain yesterday.”

“Don’t you dare laugh,” warned Anne in a whisper, as they marched along
the newspapers. “And I implore you, Diana, not to look at me, no matter
what she says, or I shall not be able to keep a sober face.”

The papers extended across the hall and into a prim, fleckless parlor.
Anne and Diana sat down gingerly on the nearest chairs and explained
their errand. Mrs. White heard them politely, interrupting only twice,
once to chase out an adventurous fly, and once to pick up a tiny wisp
of grass that had fallen on the carpet from Anne’s dress. Anne felt
wretchedly guilty; but Mrs. White subscribed two dollars and paid the
money down . . . “to prevent us from having to go back for it,” Diana
said when they got away. Mrs. White had the newspapers gathered up
before they had their horse untied and as they drove out of the yard
they saw her busily wielding a broom in the hall.

“I’ve always heard that Mrs. Theodore White was the neatest woman alive
and I’ll believe it after this,” said Diana, giving way to her
suppressed laughter as soon as it was safe.

“I am glad she has no children,” said Anne solemnly. “It would be
dreadful beyond words for them if she had.”

At the Spencers’ Mrs. Isabella Spencer made them miserable by saying
something ill-natured about everyone in Avonlea. Mr. Thomas Boulter
refused to give anything because the hall, when it had been built,
twenty years before, hadn’t been built on the site he recommended. Mrs.
Esther Bell, who was the picture of health, took half an hour to detail
all her aches and pains, and sadly put down fifty cents because she
wouldn’t be there that time next year to do it . . . no, she would be
in her grave.

Their worst reception, however, was at Simon Fletcher’s. When they
drove into the yard they saw two faces peering at them through the
porch window. But although they rapped and waited patiently and
persistently nobody came to the door. Two decidedly ruffled and
indignant girls drove away from Simon Fletcher’s. Even Anne admitted
that she was beginning to feel discouraged. But the tide turned after
that. Several Sloane homesteads came next, where they got liberal
subscriptions, and from that to the end they fared well, with only an
occasional snub. Their last place of call was at Robert Dickson’s by
the pond bridge. They stayed to tea here, although they were nearly
home, rather than risk offending Mrs. Dickson, who had the reputation
of being a very “touchy” woman.

While they were there old Mrs. James White called in.

“I’ve just been down to Lorenzo’s,” she announced. “He’s the proudest
man in Avonlea this minute. What do you think? There’s a brand new boy
there . . . and after seven girls that’s quite an event, I can tell
you.” Anne pricked up her ears, and when they drove away she said.

“I’m going straight to Lorenzo White’s.”

“But he lives on the White Sands road and it’s quite a distance out of
our way,” protested Diana. “Gilbert and Fred will canvass him.”

“They are not going around until next Saturday and it will be too late
by then,” said Anne firmly. “The novelty will be worn off. Lorenzo
White is dreadfully mean but he will subscribe to _anything_ just now.
We mustn’t let such a golden opportunity slip, Diana.” The result
justified Anne’s foresight. Mr. White met them in the yard, beaming
like the sun upon an Easter day. When Anne asked for a subscription he
agreed enthusiastically.

“Certain, certain. Just put me down for a dollar more than the highest
subscription you’ve got.”

“That will be five dollars . . . Mr. Daniel Blair put down four,” said
Anne, half afraid. But Lorenzo did not flinch.

“Five it is . . . and here’s the money on the spot. Now, I want you to
come into the house. There’s something in there worth seeing . . .
something very few people have seen as yet. Just come in and pass
_your_ opinion.”

“What will we say if the baby isn’t pretty?” whispered Diana in
trepidation as they followed the excited Lorenzo into the house.

“Oh, there will certainly be something else nice to say about it,” said
Anne easily. “There always is about a baby.”

The baby _was_ pretty, however, and Mr. White felt that he got his five
dollars’ worth of the girls’ honest delight over the plump little
newcomer. But that was the first, last, and only time that Lorenzo
White ever subscribed to anything.

Anne, tired as she was, made one more effort for the public weal that
night, slipping over the fields to interview Mr. Harrison, who was as
usual smoking his pipe on the veranda with Ginger beside him. Strickly
speaking he was on the Carmody road; but Jane and Gertie, who were not
acquainted with him save by doubtful report, had nervously begged Anne
to canvass him.

Mr. Harrison, however, flatly refused to subscribe a cent, and all
Anne’s wiles were in vain.

“But I thought you approved of our society, Mr. Harrison,” she mourned.

“So I do . . . so I do . . . but my approval doesn’t go as deep as my
pocket, Anne.”

“A few more experiences such as I have had today would make me as much
of a pessimist as Miss Eliza Andrews,” Anne told her reflection in the
east gable mirror at bedtime.




 VII
The Pointing of Duty


Anne leaned back in her chair one mild October evening and sighed. She
was sitting at a table covered with text books and exercises, but the
closely written sheets of paper before her had no apparent connection
with studies or school work.

“What is the matter?” asked Gilbert, who had arrived at the open
kitchen door just in time to hear the sigh.

Anne colored, and thrust her writing out of sight under some school
compositions.

“Nothing very dreadful. I was just trying to write out some of my
thoughts, as Professor Hamilton advised me, but I couldn’t get them to
please me. They seem so still and foolish directly they’re written down
on white paper with black ink. Fancies are like shadows . . . you can’t
cage them, they’re such wayward, dancing things. But perhaps I’ll learn
the secret some day if I keep on trying. I haven’t a great many spare
moments, you know. By the time I finish correcting school exercises and
compositions, I don’t always feel like writing any of my own.”

“You are getting on splendidly in school, Anne. All the children like
you,” said Gilbert, sitting down on the stone step.

“No, not all. Anthony Pye doesn’t and _won’t_ like me. What is worse,
he doesn’t respect me . . . no, he doesn’t. He simply holds me in
contempt and I don’t mind confessing to you that it worries me
miserably. It isn’t that he is so very bad . . . he is only rather
mischievous, but no worse than some of the others. He seldom disobeys
me; but he obeys with a scornful air of toleration as if it wasn’t
worthwhile disputing the point or he would . . . and it has a bad
effect on the others. I’ve tried every way to win him but I’m beginning
to fear I never shall. I want to, for he’s rather a cute little lad, if
he _is_ a Pye, and I could like him if he’d let me.”

“Probably it’s merely the effect of what he hears at home.”

“Not altogether. Anthony is an independent little chap and makes up his
own mind about things. He has always gone to men before and he says
girl teachers are no good. Well, we’ll see what patience and kindness
will do. I like overcoming difficulties and teaching is really very
interesting work. Paul Irving makes up for all that is lacking in the
others. That child is a perfect darling, Gilbert, and a genius into the
bargain. I’m persuaded the world will hear of him some day,” concluded
Anne in a tone of conviction.

“I like teaching, too,” said Gilbert. “It’s good training, for one
thing. Why, Anne, I’ve learned more in the weeks I’ve been teaching the
young ideas of White Sands than I learned in all the years I went to
school myself. We all seem to be getting on pretty well. The Newbridge
people like Jane, I hear; and I think White Sands is tolerably
satisfied with your humble servant . . . all except Mr. Andrew Spencer.
I met Mrs. Peter Blewett on my way home last night and she told me she
thought it her duty to inform me that Mr. Spencer didn’t approve of my
methods.”

“Have you ever noticed,” asked Anne reflectively, “that when people say
it is their duty to tell you a certain thing you may prepare for
something disagreeable? Why is it that they never seem to think it a
duty to tell you the pleasant things they hear about you? Mrs. H. B.
Don_nell_ called at the school again yesterday and told me she thought
it _her_ duty to inform me that Mrs. Harmon Andrews didn’t approve of
my reading fairy tales to the children, and that Mr. Rogerson thought
Prillie wasn’t coming on fast enough in arithmetic. If Prillie would
spend less time making eyes at the boys over her slate she might do
better. I feel quite sure that Jack Gillis works her class sums for
her, though I’ve never been able to catch him red-handed.”

“Have you succeeded in reconciling Mrs. Don_nell’s_ hopeful son to his
saintly name?”

“Yes,” laughed Anne, “but it was really a difficult task. At first,
when I called him ‘St. Clair’ he would not take the least notice until
I’d spoken two or three times; and then, when the other boys nudged
him, he would look up with such an aggrieved air, as if I’d called him
John or Charlie and he couldn’t be expected to know I meant him. So I
kept him in after school one night and talked kindly to him. I told him
his mother wished me to call him St. Clair and I couldn’t go against
her wishes. He saw it when it was all explained out . . . he’s really a
very reasonable little fellow . . . and he said _I_ could call him St.
Clair but that he’d ‘lick the stuffing’ out of any of the boys that
tried it. Of course, I had to rebuke him again for using such shocking
language. Since then _I_ call him St. Clair and the boys call him Jake
and all goes smoothly. He informs me that he means to be a carpenter,
but Mrs. Don_nell_ says I am to make a college professor out of him.”

The mention of college gave a new direction to Gilbert’s thoughts, and
they talked for a time of their plans and wishes . . . gravely,
earnestly, hopefully, as youth loves to talk, while the future is yet
an untrodden path full of wonderful possibilities.

Gilbert had finally made up his mind that he was going to be a doctor.

“It’s a splendid profession,” he said enthusiastically. “A fellow has
to fight something all through life . . . didn’t somebody once define
man as a fighting animal? . . . and I want to fight disease and pain
and ignorance . . . which are all members one of another. I want to do
my share of honest, real work in the world, Anne . . . add a little to
the sum of human knowledge that all the good men have been accumulating
since it began. The folks who lived before me have done so much for me
that I want to show my gratitude by doing something for the folks who
will live after me. It seems to me that is the only way a fellow can
get square with his obligations to the race.”

“I’d like to add some beauty to life,” said Anne dreamily. “I don’t
exactly want to make people _know_ more . . . though I know that _is_
the noblest ambition . . . but I’d love to make them have a pleasanter
time because of me . . . to have some little joy or happy thought that
would never have existed if I hadn’t been born.”

“I think you’re fulfilling that ambition every day,” said Gilbert
admiringly.

And he was right. Anne was one of the children of light by birthright.
After she had passed through a life with a smile or a word thrown
across it like a gleam of sunshine the owner of that life saw it, for
the time being at least, as hopeful and lovely and of good report.

Finally Gilbert rose regretfully.

“Well, I must run up to MacPhersons’. Moody Spurgeon came home from
Queen’s today for Sunday and he was to bring me out a book Professor
Boyd is lending me.”

“And I must get Marilla’s tea. She went to see Mrs. Keith this evening
and she will soon be back.”

Anne had tea ready when Marilla came home; the fire was crackling
cheerily, a vase of frost-bleached ferns and ruby-red maple leaves
adorned the table, and delectable odors of ham and toast pervaded the
air. But Marilla sank into her chair with a deep sigh.

“Are your eyes troubling you? Does your head ache?” queried Anne
anxiously.

“No. I’m only tired . . . and worried. It’s about Mary and those
children . . . Mary is worse . . . she can’t last much longer. And as
for the twins, _I_ don’t know what is to become of them.”

“Hasn’t their uncle been heard from?”

“Yes, Mary had a letter from him. He’s working in a lumber camp and
‘shacking it,’ whatever that means. Anyway, he says he can’t possibly
take the children till the spring. He expects to be married then and
will have a home to take them to; but he says she must get some of the
neighbors to keep them for the winter. She says she can’t bear to ask
any of them. Mary never got on any too well with the East Grafton
people and that’s a fact. And the long and short of it is, Anne, that
I’m sure Mary wants me to take those children . . . she didn’t say so
but she _looked_ it.”

“Oh!” Anne clasped her hands, all athrill with excitement. “And of
course you will, Marilla, won’t you?”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” said Marilla rather tartly. “I don’t rush
into things in your headlong way, Anne. Third cousinship is a pretty
slim claim. And it will be a fearful responsibility to have two
children of six years to look after . . . twins, at that.”

Marilla had an idea that twins were just twice as bad as single
children.

“Twins are very interesting . . . at least one pair of them,” said
Anne. “It’s only when there are two or three pairs that it gets
monotonous. And I think it would be real nice for you to have something
to amuse you when I’m away in school.”

“I don’t reckon there’d be much amusement in it . . . more worry and
bother than anything else, I should say. It wouldn’t be so risky if
they were even as old as you were when I took you. I wouldn’t mind Dora
so much . . . she seems good and quiet. But that Davy is a limb.”

Anne was fond of children and her heart yearned over the Keith twins.
The remembrance of her own neglected childhood was very vivid with her
still. She knew that Marilla’s only vulnerable point was her stern
devotion to what she believed to be her duty, and Anne skillfully
marshalled her arguments along this line.

“If Davy is naughty it’s all the more reason why he should have good
training, isn’t it, Marilla? If we don’t take them we don’t know who
will, nor what kind of influences may surround them. Suppose Mrs.
Keith’s next door neighbors, the Sprotts, were to take them. Mrs. Lynde
says Henry Sprott is the most profane man that ever lived and you can’t
believe a word his children say. Wouldn’t it be dreadful to have the
twins learn anything like that? Or suppose they went to the Wiggins’.
Mrs. Lynde says that Mr. Wiggins sells everything off the place that
can be sold and brings his family up on skim milk. You wouldn’t like
your relations to be starved, even if they were only third cousins,
would you? It seems to me, Marilla, that it is our duty to take them.”

“I suppose it is,” assented Marilla gloomily. “I daresay I’ll tell Mary
I’ll take them. You needn’t look so delighted, Anne. It will mean a
good deal of extra work for you. I can’t sew a stitch on account of my
eyes, so you’ll have to see to the making and mending of their clothes.
And you don’t like sewing.”

“I hate it,” said Anne calmly, “but if you are willing to take those
children from a sense of duty surely I can do their sewing from a sense
of duty. It does people good to have to do things they don’t like . . .
in moderation.”




 VIII
Marilla Adopts Twins


Mrs. Rachel Lynde was sitting at her kitchen window, knitting a quilt,
just as she had been sitting one evening several years previously when
Matthew Cuthbert had driven down over the hill with what Mrs. Rachel
called “his imported orphan.” But that had been in springtime; and this
was late autumn, and all the woods were leafless and the fields sere
and brown. The sun was just setting with a great deal of purple and
golden pomp behind the dark woods west of Avonlea when a buggy drawn by
a comfortable brown nag came down the hill. Mrs. Rachel peered at it
eagerly.

“There’s Marilla getting home from the funeral,” she said to her
husband, who was lying on the kitchen lounge. Thomas Lynde lay more on
the lounge nowadays than he had been used to do, but Mrs. Rachel, who
was so sharp at noticing anything beyond her own household, had not as
yet noticed this. “And she’s got the twins with her, . . . yes, there’s
Davy leaning over the dashboard grabbing at the pony’s tail and Marilla
jerking him back. Dora’s sitting up on the seat as prim as you please.
She always looks as if she’d just been starched and ironed. Well, poor
Marilla is going to have her hands full this winter and no mistake.
Still, I don’t see that she could do anything less than take them,
under the circumstances, and she’ll have Anne to help her. Anne’s
tickled to death over the whole business, and she has a real knacky way
with children, I must say. Dear me, it doesn’t seem a day since poor
Matthew brought Anne herself home and everybody laughed at the idea of
Marilla bringing up a child. And now she has adopted twins. You’re
never safe from being surprised till you’re dead.”

The fat pony jogged over the bridge in Lynde’s Hollow and along the
Green Gables lane. Marilla’s face was rather grim. It was ten miles
from East Grafton and Davy Keith seemed to be possessed with a passion
for perpetual motion. It was beyond Marilla’s power to make him sit
still and she had been in an agony the whole way lest he fall over the
back of the wagon and break his neck, or tumble over the dashboard
under the pony’s heels. In despair she finally threatened to whip him
soundly when she got him home. Whereupon Davy climbed into her lap,
regardless of the reins, flung his chubby arms about her neck and gave
her a bear-like hug.

“I don’t believe you mean it,” he said, smacking her wrinkled cheek
affectionately. “You don’t _look_ like a lady who’d whip a little boy
just ’cause he couldn’t keep still. Didn’t you find it awful hard to
keep still when you was only ‘s old as me?”

“No, I always kept still when I was told,” said Marilla, trying to
speak sternly, albeit she felt her heart waxing soft within her under
Davy’s impulsive caresses.

“Well, I s’pose that was ’cause you was a girl,” said Davy, squirming
back to his place after another hug. “You _was_ a girl once, I s’pose,
though it’s awful funny to think of it. Dora can sit still . . . but
there ain’t much fun in it _I_ don’t think. Seems to me it must be slow
to be a girl. Here, Dora, let me liven you up a bit.”

Davy’s method of “livening up” was to grasp Dora’s curls in his fingers
and give them a tug. Dora shrieked and then cried.

“How can you be such a naughty boy and your poor mother just laid in
her grave this very day?” demanded Marilla despairingly.

“But she was glad to die,” said Davy confidentially. “I know, ’cause
she told me so. She was awful tired of being sick. We’d a long talk the
night before she died. She told me you was going to take me and Dora
for the winter and I was to be a good boy. I’m going to be good, but
can’t you be good running round just as well as sitting still? And she
said I was always to be kind to Dora and stand up for her, and I’m
going to.”

“Do you call pulling her hair being kind to her?”

“Well, I ain’t going to let anybody else pull it,” said Davy, doubling
up his fists and frowning. “They’d just better try it. I didn’t hurt
her much . . . she just cried ’cause she’s a girl. I’m glad I’m a boy
but I’m sorry I’m a twin. When Jimmy Sprott’s sister conterdicks him he
just says, ‘I’m oldern you, so of course I know better,’ and that
settles _her_. But I can’t tell Dora that, and she just goes on
thinking diffrunt from me. You might let me drive the gee-gee for a
spell, since I’m a man.”

Altogether, Marilla was a thankful woman when she drove into her own
yard, where the wind of the autumn night was dancing with the brown
leaves. Anne was at the gate to meet them and lift the twins out. Dora
submitted calmly to be kissed, but Davy responded to Anne’s welcome
with one of his hearty hugs and the cheerful announcement, “I’m Mr.
Davy Keith.”

At the supper table Dora behaved like a little lady, but Davy’s manners
left much to be desired.

“I’m so hungry I ain’t got time to eat p’litely,” he said when Marilla
reproved him. “Dora ain’t half as hungry as I am. Look at all the
ex’cise I took on the road here. That cake’s awful nice and plummy. We
haven’t had any cake at home for ever’n ever so long, ’cause mother was
too sick to make it and Mrs. Sprott said it was as much as she could do
to bake our bread for us. And Mrs. Wiggins never puts any plums in
_her_ cakes. Catch her! Can I have another piece?”

Marilla would have refused but Anne cut a generous second slice.
However, she reminded Davy that he ought to say “Thank you” for it.
Davy merely grinned at her and took a huge bite. When he had finished
the slice he said,

“If you’ll give me _another_ piece I’ll say thank you for _it_.”

“No, you have had plenty of cake,” said Marilla in a tone which Anne
knew and Davy was to learn to be final.

Davy winked at Anne, and then, leaning over the table, snatched Dora’s
first piece of cake, from which she had just taken one dainty little
bite, out of her very fingers and, opening his mouth to the fullest
extent, crammed the whole slice in. Dora’s lip trembled and Marilla was
speechless with horror. Anne promptly exclaimed, with her best
“schoolma’am” air,

“Oh, Davy, gentlemen don’t do things like that.”

“I know they don’t,” said Davy, as soon as he could speak, “but I ain’t
a gemplum.”

“But don’t you want to be?” said shocked Anne.

“Course I do. But you can’t be a gemplum till you grow up.”

“Oh, indeed you can,” Anne hastened to say, thinking she saw a chance
to sow good seed betimes. “You can begin to be a gentleman when you are
a little boy. And gentlemen _never_ snatch things from ladies . . . or
forget to say thank you . . . or pull anybody’s hair.”

“They don’t have much fun, that’s a fact,” said Davy frankly. “I guess
I’ll wait till I’m grown up to be one.”

Marilla, with a resigned air, had cut another piece of cake for Dora.
She did not feel able to cope with Davy just then. It had been a hard
day for her, what with the funeral and the long drive. At that moment
she looked forward to the future with a pessimism that would have done
credit to Eliza Andrews herself.

The twins were not noticeably alike, although both were fair. Dora had
long sleek curls that never got out of order. Davy had a crop of fuzzy
little yellow ringlets all over his round head. Dora’s hazel eyes were
gentle and mild; Davy’s were as roguish and dancing as an elf’s. Dora’s
nose was straight, Davy’s a positive snub; Dora had a “prunes and
prisms” mouth, Davy’s was all smiles; and besides, he had a dimple in
one cheek and none in the other, which gave him a dear, comical,
lopsided look when he laughed. Mirth and mischief lurked in every
corner of his little face.

“They’d better go to bed,” said Marilla, who thought it was the easiest
way to dispose of them. “Dora will sleep with me and you can put Davy
in the west gable. You’re not afraid to sleep alone, are you, Davy?”

“No; but I ain’t going to bed for ever so long yet,” said Davy
comfortably.

“Oh, yes, you are.” That was all the much-tried Marilla said, but
something in her tone squelched even Davy. He trotted obediently
upstairs with Anne.

“When I’m grown up the very first thing I’m going to do is stay up
_all_ night just to see what it would be like,” he told her
confidentially.

In after years Marilla never thought of that first week of the twins’
sojourn at Green Gables without a shiver. Not that it really was so
much worse than the weeks that followed it; but it seemed so by reason
of its novelty. There was seldom a waking minute of any day when Davy
was not in mischief or devising it; but his first notable exploit
occurred two days after his arrival, on Sunday morning . . . a fine,
warm day, as hazy and mild as September. Anne dressed him for church
while Marilla attended to Dora. Davy at first objected strongly to
having his face washed.

“Marilla washed it yesterday . . . and Mrs. Wiggins scoured me with
hard soap the day of the funeral. That’s enough for one week. I don’t
see the good of being so awful clean. It’s lots more comfable being
dirty.”

“Paul Irving washes his face every day of his own accord,” said Anne
astutely.

Davy had been an inmate of Green Gables for little over forty-eight
hours; but he already worshipped Anne and hated Paul Irving, whom he
had heard Anne praising enthusiastically the day after his arrival. If
Paul Irving washed his face every day, that settled it. He, Davy Keith,
would do it too, if it killed him. The same consideration induced him
to submit meekly to the other details of his toilet, and he was really
a handsome little lad when all was done. Anne felt an almost maternal
pride in him as she led him into the old Cuthbert pew.

Davy behaved quite well at first, being occupied in casting covert
glances at all the small boys within view and wondering which was Paul
Irving. The first two hymns and the Scripture reading passed off
uneventfully. Mr. Allan was praying when the sensation came.

Lauretta White was sitting in front of Davy, her head slightly bent and
her fair hair hanging in two long braids, between which a tempting
expanse of white neck showed, encased in a loose lace frill. Lauretta
was a fat, placid-looking child of eight, who had conducted herself
irreproachably in church from the very first day her mother carried her
there, an infant of six months.

Davy thrust his hand into his pocket and produced . . . a caterpillar,
a furry, squirming caterpillar. Marilla saw and clutched at him but she
was too late. Davy dropped the caterpillar down Lauretta’s neck.

Right into the middle of Mr. Allan’s prayer burst a series of piercing
shrieks. The minister stopped appalled and opened his eyes. Every head
in the congregation flew up. Lauretta White was dancing up and down in
her pew, clutching frantically at the back of her dress.

“Ow . . . mommer . . . mommer . . . ow . . . take it off . . . ow . . .
get it out . . . ow . . . that bad boy put it down my neck . . . ow . .
. mommer . . . it’s going further down . . . ow . . . ow . . . ow. . .
.”

Mrs. White rose and with a set face carried the hysterical, writhing
Lauretta out of church. Her shrieks died away in the distance and Mr.
Allan proceeded with the service. But everybody felt that it was a
failure that day. For the first time in her life Marilla took no notice
of the text and Anne sat with scarlet cheeks of mortification.

When they got home Marilla put Davy to bed and made him stay there for
the rest of the day. She would not give him any dinner but allowed him
a plain tea of bread and milk. Anne carried it to him and sat
sorrowfully by him while he ate it with an unrepentant relish. But
Anne’s mournful eyes troubled him.

“I s’pose,” he said reflectively, “that Paul Irving wouldn’t have
dropped a caterpillar down a girl’s neck in church, would he?”

“Indeed he wouldn’t,” said Anne sadly.

“Well, I’m kind of sorry I did it, then,” conceded Davy. “But it was
such a jolly big caterpillar . . . I picked him up on the church steps
just as we went in. It seemed a pity to waste him. And say, wasn’t it
fun to hear that girl yell?”

Tuesday afternoon the Aid Society met at Green Gables. Anne hurried
home from school, for she knew that Marilla would need all the
assistance she could give. Dora, neat and proper, in her nicely
starched white dress and black sash, was sitting with the members of
the Aid in the parlor, speaking demurely when spoken to, keeping
silence when not, and in every way comporting herself as a model child.
Davy, blissfully dirty, was making mud pies in the barnyard.

“I told him he might,” said Marilla wearily. “I thought it would keep
him out of worse mischief. He can only get dirty at that. We’ll have
our teas over before we call him to his. Dora can have hers with us,
but I would never dare to let Davy sit down at the table with all the
Aids here.”

When Anne went to call the Aids to tea she found that Dora was not in
the parlor. Mrs. Jasper Bell said Davy had come to the front door and
called her out. A hasty consultation with Marilla in the pantry
resulted in a decision to let both children have their teas together
later on.

Tea was half over when the dining room was invaded by a forlorn figure.
Marilla and Anne stared in dismay, the Aids in amazement. Could that be
Dora . . . that sobbing nondescript in a drenched, dripping dress and
hair from which the water was streaming on Marilla’s new coin-spot rug?

“Dora, what has happened to you?” cried Anne, with a guilty glance at
Mrs. Jasper Bell, whose family was said to be the only one in the world
in which accidents never occurred.

“Davy made me walk the pigpen fence,” wailed Dora. “I didn’t want to
but he called me a fraid-cat. And I fell off into the pigpen and my
dress got all dirty and the pig runned right over me. My dress was just
awful but Davy said if I’d stand under the pump he’d wash it clean, and
I did and he pumped water all over me but my dress ain’t a bit cleaner
and my pretty sash and shoes is all spoiled.”

Anne did the honors of the table alone for the rest of the meal while
Marilla went upstairs and redressed Dora in her old clothes. Davy was
caught and sent to bed without any supper. Anne went to his room at
twilight and talked to him seriously . . . a method in which she had
great faith, not altogether unjustified by results. She told him she
felt very badly over his conduct.

“I feel sorry now myself,” admitted Davy, “but the trouble is I never
feel sorry for doing things till after I’ve did them. Dora wouldn’t
help me make pies, cause she was afraid of messing her clo’es and that
made me hopping mad. I s’pose Paul Irving wouldn’t have made _his_
sister walk a pigpen fence if he knew she’d fall in?”

“No, he would never dream of such a thing. Paul is a perfect little
gentleman.”

Davy screwed his eyes tight shut and seemed to meditate on this for a
time. Then he crawled up and put his arms about Anne’s neck, snuggling
his flushed little face down on her shoulder.

“Anne, don’t you like me a little bit, even if I ain’t a good boy like
Paul?”

“Indeed I do,” said Anne sincerely. Somehow, it was impossible to help
liking Davy. “But I’d like you better still if you weren’t so naughty.”

“I . . . did something else today,” went on Davy in a muffled voice.
“I’m sorry now but I’m awful scared to tell you. You won’t be very
cross, will you? And you won’t tell Marilla, will you?”

“I don’t know, Davy. Perhaps I ought to tell her. But I think I can
promise you I won’t if you promise me that you will never do it again,
whatever it is.”

“No, I never will. Anyhow, it’s not likely I’d find any more of them
this year. I found this one on the cellar steps.”

“Davy, what is it you’ve done?”

“I put a toad in Marilla’s bed. You can go and take it out if you like.
But say, Anne, wouldn’t it be fun to leave it there?”

“Davy Keith!” Anne sprang from Davy’s clinging arms and flew across the
hall to Marilla’s room. The bed was slightly rumpled. She threw back
the blankets in nervous haste and there in very truth was the toad,
blinking at her from under a pillow.

“How can I carry that awful thing out?” moaned Anne with a shudder. The
fire shovel suggested itself to her and she crept down to get it while
Marilla was busy in the pantry. Anne had her own troubles carrying that
toad downstairs, for it hopped off the shovel three times and once she
thought she had lost it in the hall. When she finally deposited it in
the cherry orchard she drew a long breath of relief.

“If Marilla knew she’d never feel safe getting into bed again in her
life. I’m so glad that little sinner repented in time. There’s Diana
signaling to me from her window. I’m glad . . . I really feel the need
of some diversion, for what with Anthony Pye in school and Davy Keith
at home my nerves have had about all they can endure for one day.”




 IX
A Question of Color


“That old nuisance of a Rachel Lynde was here again today, pestering me
for a subscription towards buying a carpet for the vestry room,” said
Mr. Harrison wrathfully. “I detest that woman more than anybody I know.
She can put a whole sermon, text, comment, and application, into six
words, and throw it at you like a brick.”

Anne, who was perched on the edge of the veranda, enjoying the charm of
a mild west wind blowing across a newly ploughed field on a gray
November twilight and piping a quaint little melody among the twisted
firs below the garden, turned her dreamy face over her shoulder.

“The trouble is, you and Mrs. Lynde don’t understand one another,” she
explained. “That is always what is wrong when people don’t like each
other. I didn’t like Mrs. Lynde at first either; but as soon as I came
to understand her I learned to.”

“Mrs. Lynde may be an acquired taste with some folks; but I didn’t keep
on eating bananas because I was told I’d learn to like them if I did,”
growled Mr. Harrison. “And as for understanding her, I understand that
she is a confirmed busybody and I told her so.”

“Oh, that must have hurt her feelings very much,” said Anne
reproachfully. “How could you say such a thing? _I_ said some dreadful
things to Mrs. Lynde long ago but it was when I had lost my temper. I
couldn’t say them _deliberately_.”

“It was the truth and I believe in telling the truth to everybody.”

“But you don’t tell the whole truth,” objected Anne. “You only tell the
disagreeable part of the truth. Now, you’ve told me a dozen times that
my hair was red, but you’ve never once told me that I had a nice nose.”

“I daresay you know it without any telling,” chuckled Mr. Harrison.

“I know I have red hair too . . . although it’s _much_ darker than it
used to be . . . so there’s no need of telling me that either.”

“Well, well, I’ll try and not mention it again since you’re so
sensitive. You must excuse me, Anne. I’ve got a habit of being
outspoken and folks mustn’t mind it.”

“But they can’t help minding it. And I don’t think it’s any help that
it’s your habit. What would you think of a person who went about
sticking pins and needles into people and saying, ‘Excuse me, you
mustn’t mind it . . . it’s just a habit I’ve got.’ You’d think he was
crazy, wouldn’t you? And as for Mrs. Lynde being a busybody, perhaps
she is. But did you tell her she had a very kind heart and always
helped the poor, and never said a word when Timothy Cotton stole a
crock of butter out of her dairy and told his wife he’d bought it from
her? Mrs. Cotton cast it up to her the next time they met that it
tasted of turnips and Mrs. Lynde just said she was sorry it had turned
out so poorly.”

“I suppose she has some good qualities,” conceded Mr. Harrison
grudgingly. “Most folks have. I have some myself, though you might
never suspect it. But anyhow I ain’t going to give anything to that
carpet. Folks are everlasting begging for money here, it seems to me.
How’s your project of painting the hall coming on?”

“Splendidly. We had a meeting of the A.V.I.S. last Friday night and
found that we had plenty of money subscribed to paint the hall and
shingle the roof too. _Most_ people gave very liberally, Mr. Harrison.”

Anne was a sweet-souled lass, but she could instill some venom into
innocent italics when occasion required.

“What color are you going to have it?”

“We have decided on a very pretty green. The roof will be dark red, of
course. Mr. Roger Pye is going to get the paint in town today.”

“Who’s got the job?”

“Mr. Joshua Pye of Carmody. He has nearly finished the shingling. We
had to give him the contract, for every one of the Pyes . . . and there
are four families, you know . . . said they wouldn’t give a cent unless
Joshua got it. They had subscribed twelve dollars between them and we
thought that was too much to lose, although some people think we
shouldn’t have given in to the Pyes. Mrs. Lynde says they try to run
everything.”

“The main question is will this Joshua do his work well. If he does I
don’t see that it matters whether his name is Pye or Pudding.”

“He has the reputation of being a good workman, though they say he’s a
very peculiar man. He hardly ever talks.”

“He’s peculiar enough all right then,” said Mr. Harrison drily. “Or at
least, folks here will call him so. I never was much of a talker till I
came to Avonlea and then I had to begin in self-defense or Mrs. Lynde
would have said I was dumb and started a subscription to have me taught
sign language. You’re not going yet, Anne?”

“I must. I have some sewing to do for Dora this evening. Besides, Davy
is probably breaking Marilla’s heart with some new mischief by this
time. This morning the first thing he said was, ‘Where does the dark
go, Anne? I want to know.’ I told him it went around to the other side
of the world but after breakfast he declared it didn’t . . . that it
went down the well. Marilla says she caught him hanging over the
well-box four times today, trying to reach down to the dark.”

“He’s a limb,” declared Mr. Harrison. “He came over here yesterday and
pulled six feathers out of Ginger’s tail before I could get in from the
barn. The poor bird has been moping ever since. Those children must be
a sight of trouble to you folks.”

“Everything that’s worth having is some trouble,” said Anne, secretly
resolving to forgive Davy’s next offence, whatever it might be, since
he had avenged her on Ginger.

Mr. Roger Pye brought the hall paint home that night and Mr. Joshua
Pye, a surly, taciturn man, began painting the next day. He was not
disturbed in his task. The hall was situated on what was called “the
lower road.” In late autumn this road was always muddy and wet, and
people going to Carmody traveled by the longer “upper” road. The hall
was so closely surrounded by fir woods that it was invisible unless you
were near it. Mr. Joshua Pye painted away in the solitude and
independence that were so dear to his unsociable heart.

Friday afternoon he finished his job and went home to Carmody. Soon
after his departure Mrs. Rachel Lynde drove by, having braved the mud
of the lower road out of curiosity to see what the hall looked like in
its new coat of paint. When she rounded the spruce curve she saw.

The sight affected Mrs. Lynde oddly. She dropped the reins, held up her
hands, and said “Gracious Providence!” She stared as if she could not
believe her eyes. Then she laughed almost hysterically.

“There must be some mistake . . . there _must_. I knew those Pyes would
make a mess of things.”

Mrs. Lynde drove home, meeting several people on the road and stopping
to tell them about the hall. The news flew like wildfire. Gilbert
Blythe, poring over a text book at home, heard it from his father’s
hired boy at sunset, and rushed breathlessly to Green Gables, joined on
the way by Fred Wright. They found Diana Barry, Jane Andrews, and Anne
Shirley, despair personified, at the yard gate of Green Gables, under
the big leafless willows.

“It isn’t true surely, Anne?” exclaimed Gilbert.

“It is true,” answered Anne, looking like the muse of tragedy. “Mrs.
Lynde called on her way from Carmody to tell me. Oh, it is simply
dreadful! _What_ is the use of trying to improve anything?”

“What is dreadful?” asked Oliver Sloane, arriving at this moment with a
bandbox he had brought from town for Marilla.

“Haven’t you heard?” said Jane wrathfully. “Well, its simply this. . .
Joshua Pye _has gone and painted the hall blue instead of green_ . . .
a deep, brilliant blue, the shade they use for painting carts and
wheelbarrows. And Mrs. Lynde says it is the most hideous color for a
building, especially when combined with a red roof, that she ever saw
or imagined. You could simply have knocked me down with a feather when
I heard it. It’s heartbreaking, after all the trouble we’ve had.”

“How on earth could such a mistake have happened?” wailed Diana.

The blame of this unmerciful disaster was eventually narrowed down to
the Pyes. The Improvers had decided to use Morton-Harris paints and the
Morton-Harris paint cans were numbered according to a color card. A
purchaser chose his shade on the card and ordered by the accompanying
number. Number 147 was the shade of green desired and when Mr. Roger
Pye sent word to the Improvers by his son, John Andrew, that he was
going to town and would get their paint for them, the Improvers told
John Andrew to tell his father to get 147. John Andrew always averred
that he did so, but Mr. Roger Pye as stanchly declared that John Andrew
told him 157; and there the matter stands to this day.

That night there was blank dismay in every Avonlea house where an
Improver lived. The gloom at Green Gables was so intense that it
quenched even Davy. Anne wept and would not be comforted.

“I _must_ cry, even if I am almost seventeen, Marilla,” she sobbed. “It
is so mortifying. And it sounds the death knell of our society. We’ll
simply be laughed out of existence.”

In life, as in dreams, however, things often go by contraries. The
Avonlea people did not laugh; they were too angry. _Their_ money had
gone to paint the hall and consequently _they_ felt themselves bitterly
aggrieved by the mistake. Public indignation centered on the Pyes.
Roger Pye and John Andrew had bungled the matter between them; and as
for Joshua Pye, he must be a born fool not to suspect there was
something wrong when he opened the cans and saw the color of the paint.
Joshua Pye, when thus animadverted upon, retorted that the Avonlea
taste in colors was no business of his, whatever his private opinion
might be; he had been hired to paint the hall, not to talk about it;
and he meant to have his money for it.

The Improvers paid him his money in bitterness of spirit, after
consulting Mr. Peter Sloane, who was a magistrate.

“You’ll have to pay it,” Peter told him. “You can’t hold him
responsible for the mistake, since he claims he was never told what the
color was supposed to be but just given the cans and told to go ahead.
But it’s a burning shame and that hall certainly does look awful.”

The luckless Improvers expected that Avonlea would be more prejudiced
than ever against them; but instead, public sympathy veered around in
their favor. People thought the eager, enthusiastic little band who had
worked so hard for their object had been badly used. Mrs. Lynde told
them to keep on and show the Pyes that there really were people in the
world who could do things without making a muddle of them. Mr. Major
Spencer sent them word that he would clean out all the stumps along the
road front of his farm and seed it down with grass at his own expense;
and Mrs. Hiram Sloane called at the school one day and beckoned Anne
mysteriously out into the porch to tell her that if the “Sassiety”
wanted to make a geranium bed at the crossroads in the spring they
needn’t be afraid of her cow, for she would see that the marauding
animal was kept within safe bounds. Even Mr. Harrison chuckled, if he
chuckled at all, in private, and was all sympathy outwardly.

“Never mind, Anne. Most paints fade uglier every year but that blue is
as ugly as it can be to begin with, so it’s bound to fade prettier. And
the roof is shingled and painted all right. Folks will be able to sit
in the hall after this without being leaked on. You’ve accomplished so
much anyhow.”

“But Avonlea’s blue hall will be a byword in all the neighboring
settlements from this time out,” said Anne bitterly.

And it must be confessed that it was.




 X
Davy in Search of a Sensation


Anne, walking home from school through the Birch Path one November
afternoon, felt convinced afresh that life was a very wonderful thing.
The day had been a good day; all had gone well in her little kingdom.
St. Clair Donnell had _not_ fought any of the other boys over the
question of his name; Prillie Rogerson’s face had been so puffed up
from the effects of toothache that she did not once try to coquette
with the boys in her vicinity. Barbara Shaw had met with only _one_
accident . . . spilling a dipper of water over the floor . . . and
Anthony Pye had not been in school at all.

“What a nice month this November has been!” said Anne, who had never
quite got over her childish habit of talking to herself. “November is
usually such a disagreeable month . . . as if the year had suddenly
found out that she was growing old and could do nothing but weep and
fret over it. This year is growing old gracefully . . . just like a
stately old lady who knows she can be charming even with gray hair and
wrinkles. We’ve had lovely days and delicious twilights. This last
fortnight has been so peaceful, and even Davy has been almost
well-behaved. I really think he is improving a great deal. How quiet
the woods are today . . . not a murmur except that soft wind purring in
the treetops! It sounds like surf on a faraway shore. How dear the
woods are! You beautiful trees! I love every one of you as a friend.”

Anne paused to throw her arm about a slim young birch and kiss its
cream-white trunk. Diana, rounding a curve in the path, saw her and
laughed.

“Anne Shirley, you’re only pretending to be grown up. I believe when
you’re alone you’re as much a little girl as you ever were.”

“Well, one can’t get over the habit of being a little girl all at
once,” said Anne gaily. “You see, I was little for fourteen years and
I’ve only been grown-uppish for scarcely three. I’m sure I shall always
feel like a child in the woods. These walks home from school are almost
the only time I have for dreaming . . . except the half-hour or so
before I go to sleep. I’m so busy with teaching and studying and
helping Marilla with the twins that I haven’t another moment for
imagining things. You don’t know what splendid adventures I have for a
little while after I go to bed in the east gable every night. I always
imagine I’m something very brilliant and triumphant and splendid . . .
a great prima donna or a Red Cross nurse or a queen. Last night I was a
queen. It’s really splendid to imagine you are a queen. You have all
the fun of it without any of the inconveniences and you can stop being
a queen whenever you want to, which you couldn’t in real life. But here
in the woods I like best to imagine quite different things . . . I’m a
dryad living in an old pine, or a little brown wood-elf hiding under a
crinkled leaf. That white birch you caught me kissing is a sister of
mine. The only difference is, she’s a tree and I’m a girl, but that’s
no real difference. Where are you going, Diana?”

“Down to the Dicksons. I promised to help Alberta cut out her new
dress. Can’t you walk down in the evening, Anne, and come home with
me?”

“I might . . . since Fred Wright is away in town,” said Anne with a
rather too innocent face.

Diana blushed, tossed her head, and walked on. She did not look
offended, however.

Anne fully intended to go down to the Dicksons’ that evening, but she
did not. When she arrived at Green Gables she found a state of affairs
which banished every other thought from her mind. Marilla met her in
the yard . . . a wild-eyed Marilla.

“Anne, Dora is lost!”

“Dora! Lost!” Anne looked at Davy, who was swinging on the yard gate,
and detected merriment in his eyes. “Davy, do you know where she is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Davy stoutly. “I haven’t seen her since dinner
time, cross my heart.”

“I’ve been away ever since one o’clock,” said Marilla. “Thomas Lynde
took sick all of a sudden and Rachel sent up for me to go at once. When
I left here Dora was playing with her doll in the kitchen and Davy was
making mud pies behind the barn. I only got home half an hour ago . . .
and no Dora to be seen. Davy declares he never saw her since I left.”

“Neither I did,” avowed Davy solemnly.

“She must be somewhere around,” said Anne. “She would never wander far
away alone . . . you know how timid she is. Perhaps she has fallen
asleep in one of the rooms.”

Marilla shook her head.

“I’ve hunted the whole house through. But she may be in some of the
buildings.”

A thorough search followed. Every corner of house, yard, and
outbuildings was ransacked by those two distracted people. Anne roved
the orchards and the Haunted Wood, calling Dora’s name. Marilla took a
candle and explored the cellar. Davy accompanied each of them in turn,
and was fertile in thinking of places where Dora could possibly be.
Finally they met again in the yard.

“It’s a most mysterious thing,” groaned Marilla.

“Where can she be?” said Anne miserably

“Maybe she’s tumbled into the well,” suggested Davy cheerfully.

Anne and Marilla looked fearfully into each other’s eyes. The thought
had been with them both through their entire search but neither had
dared to put it into words.

“She . . . she might have,” whispered Marilla.

Anne, feeling faint and sick, went to the wellbox and peered over. The
bucket sat on the shelf inside. Far down below was a tiny glimmer of
still water. The Cuthbert well was the deepest in Avonlea. If Dora. . .
but Anne could not face the idea. She shuddered and turned away.

“Run across for Mr. Harrison,” said Marilla, wringing her hands.

“Mr. Harrison and John Henry are both away . . . they went to town
today. I’ll go for Mr. Barry.”

Mr. Barry came back with Anne, carrying a coil of rope to which was
attached a claw-like instrument that had been the business end of a
grubbing fork. Marilla and Anne stood by, cold and shaken with horror
and dread, while Mr. Barry dragged the well, and Davy, astride the
gate, watched the group with a face indicative of huge enjoyment.

Finally Mr. Barry shook his head, with a relieved air.

“She can’t be down there. It’s a mighty curious thing where she could
have got to, though. Look here, young man, are you sure you’ve no idea
where your sister is?”

“I’ve told you a dozen times that I haven’t,” said Davy, with an
injured air. “Maybe a tramp come and stole her.”

“Nonsense,” said Marilla sharply, relieved from her horrible fear of
the well. “Anne, do you suppose she could have strayed over to Mr.
Harrison’s? She has always been talking about his parrot ever since
that time you took her over.”

“I can’t believe Dora would venture so far alone but I’ll go over and
see,” said Anne.

Nobody was looking at Davy just then or it would have been seen that a
very decided change came over his face. He quietly slipped off the gate
and ran, as fast as his fat legs could carry him, to the barn.

Anne hastened across the fields to the Harrison establishment in no
very hopeful frame of mind. The house was locked, the window shades
were down, and there was no sign of anything living about the place.
She stood on the veranda and called Dora loudly.

Ginger, in the kitchen behind her, shrieked and swore with sudden
fierceness; but between his outbursts Anne heard a plaintive cry from
the little building in the yard which served Mr. Harrison as a
toolhouse. Anne flew to the door, unhasped it, and caught up a small
mortal with a tearstained face who was sitting forlornly on an upturned
nail keg.

“Oh, Dora, Dora, what a fright you have given us! How came you to be
here?”

“Davy and I came over to see Ginger,” sobbed Dora, “but we couldn’t see
him after all, only Davy made him swear by kicking the door. And then
Davy brought me here and run out and shut the door; and I couldn’t get
out. I cried and cried, I was frightened, and oh, I’m so hungry and
cold; and I thought you’d never come, Anne.”

“Davy?” But Anne could say no more. She carried Dora home with a heavy
heart. Her joy at finding the child safe and sound was drowned out in
the pain caused by Davy’s behavior. The freak of shutting Dora up might
easily have been pardoned. But Davy had told falsehoods . . . downright
coldblooded falsehoods about it. That was the ugly fact and Anne could
not shut her eyes to it. She could have sat down and cried with sheer
disappointment. She had grown to love Davy dearly . . . how dearly she
had not known until this minute . . . and it hurt her unbearably to
discover that he was guilty of deliberate falsehood.

Marilla listened to Anne’s tale in a silence that boded no good
Davy-ward; Mr. Barry laughed and advised that Davy be summarily dealt
with. When he had gone home Anne soothed and warmed the sobbing,
shivering Dora, got her her supper and put her to bed. Then she
returned to the kitchen, just as Marilla came grimly in, leading, or
rather pulling, the reluctant, cobwebby Davy, whom she had just found
hidden away in the darkest corner of the stable.

She jerked him to the mat on the middle of the floor and then went and
sat down by the east window. Anne was sitting limply by the west
window. Between them stood the culprit. His back was toward Marilla and
it was a meek, subdued, frightened back; but his face was toward Anne
and although it was a little shamefaced there was a gleam of
comradeship in Davy’s eyes, as if he knew he had done wrong and was
going to be punished for it, but could count on a laugh over it all
with Anne later on.

But no half hidden smile answered him in Anne’s gray eyes, as there
might have done had it been only a question of mischief. There was
something else . . . something ugly and repulsive.

“How could you behave so, Davy?” she asked sorrowfully.

Davy squirmed uncomfortably.

“I just did it for fun. Things have been so awful quiet here for so
long that I thought it would be fun to give you folks a big scare. It
was, too.”

In spite of fear and a little remorse Davy grinned over the
recollection.

“But you told a falsehood about it, Davy,” said Anne, more sorrowfully
than ever.

Davy looked puzzled.

“What’s a falsehood? Do you mean a whopper?”

“I mean a story that was not true.”

“Course I did,” said Davy frankly. “If I hadn’t you wouldn’t have been
scared. I _had_ to tell it.”

Anne was feeling the reaction from her fright and exertions. Davy’s
impenitent attitude gave the finishing touch. Two big tears brimmed up
in her eyes.

“Oh, Davy, how could you?” she said, with a quiver in her voice. “Don’t
you know how wrong it was?”

Davy was aghast. Anne crying . . . he had made Anne cry! A flood of
real remorse rolled like a wave over his warm little heart and engulfed
it. He rushed to Anne, hurled himself into her lap, flung his arms
around her neck, and burst into tears.

“I didn’t know it was wrong to tell whoppers,” he sobbed. “How did you
expect me to know it was wrong? All Mr. Sprott’s children told them
_regular_ every day, and cross their hearts too. I s’pose Paul Irving
never tells whoppers and here I’ve been trying awful hard to be as good
as him, but now I s’pose you’ll never love me again. But I think you
might have told me it was wrong. I’m awful sorry I’ve made you cry,
Anne, and I’ll never tell a whopper again.”

Davy buried his face in Anne’s shoulder and cried stormily. Anne, in a
sudden glad flash of understanding, held him tight and looked over his
curly thatch at Marilla.

“He didn’t know it was wrong to tell falsehoods, Marilla. I think we
must forgive him for that part of it this time if he will promise never
to say what isn’t true again.”

“I never will, now that I know it’s bad,” asseverated Davy between
sobs. “If you ever catch me telling a whopper again you can . . .” Davy
groped mentally for a suitable penance . . . “you can skin me alive,
Anne.”

“Don’t say ‘whopper,’ Davy . . . say ‘falsehood,’” said the
schoolma’am.

“Why?” queried Davy, settling comfortably down and looking up with a
tearstained, investigating face. “Why ain’t whopper as good as
falsehood? I want to know. It’s just as big a word.”

“It’s slang; and it’s wrong for little boys to use slang.”

“There’s an awful lot of things it’s wrong to do,” said Davy with a
sigh. “I never s’posed there was so many. I’m sorry it’s wrong to tell
whop . . . falsehoods, ’cause it’s awful handy, but since it is I’m
never going to tell any more. What are you going to do to me for
telling them this time? I want to know.” Anne looked beseechingly at
Marilla.

“I don’t want to be too hard on the child,” said Marilla. “I daresay
nobody ever did tell him it was wrong to tell lies, and those Sprott
children were no fit companions for him. Poor Mary was too sick to
train him properly and I presume you couldn’t expect a six-year-old
child to know things like that by instinct. I suppose we’ll just have
to assume he doesn’t know _anything_ right and begin at the beginning.
But he’ll have to be punished for shutting Dora up, and I can’t think
of any way except to send him to bed without his supper and we’ve done
that so often. Can’t you suggest something else, Anne? I should think
you ought to be able to, with that imagination you’re always talking
of.”

“But punishments are so horrid and I like to imagine only pleasant
things,” said Anne, cuddling Davy. “There are so many unpleasant things
in the world already that there is no use in imagining any more.”

In the end Davy was sent to bed, as usual, there to remain until noon
next day. He evidently did some thinking, for when Anne went up to her
room a little later she heard him calling her name softly. Going in,
she found him sitting up in bed, with his elbows on his knees and his
chin propped on his hands.

“Anne,” he said solemnly, “is it wrong for everybody to tell whop . . .
falsehoods? I want to know?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Is it wrong for a grown-up person?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” said Davy decidedly, “Marilla is bad, for _she_ tells them. And
she’s worse’n me, for I didn’t know it was wrong but she does.”

“Davy Keith, Marilla never told a story in her life,” said Anne
indignantly.

“She did so. She told me last Tuesday that something dreadful _would_
happen to me if I didn’t say my prayers every night. And I haven’t said
them for over a week, just to see what would happen . . . and nothing
has,” concluded Davy in an aggrieved tone.

Anne choked back a mad desire to laugh with the conviction that it
would be fatal, and then earnestly set about saving Marilla’s
reputation.

“Why, Davy Keith,” she said solemnly, “something dreadful _has_
happened to you this very day.”

Davy looked sceptical.

“I s’pose you mean being sent to bed without any supper,” he said
scornfully, “but _that_ isn’t dreadful. Course, I don’t like it, but
I’ve been sent to bed so much since I come here that I’m getting used
to it. And you don’t save anything by making me go without supper
either, for I always eat twice as much for breakfast.”

“I don’t mean your being sent to bed. I mean the fact that you told a
falsehood today. And, Davy,” . . . Anne leaned over the footboard of
the bed and shook her finger impressively at the culprit . . . “for a
boy to tell what isn’t true is almost the worst thing that _could_
happen to him . . . almost the very worst. So you see Marilla told you
the truth.”

“But I thought the something bad would be exciting,” protested Davy in
an injured tone.

“Marilla isn’t to blame for what you thought. Bad things aren’t always
exciting. They’re very often just nasty and stupid.”

“It was awful funny to see Marilla and you looking down the well,
though,” said Davy, hugging his knees.

Anne kept a sober face until she got downstairs and then she collapsed
on the sitting room lounge and laughed until her sides ached.

“I wish you’d tell me the joke,” said Marilla, a little grimly. “I
haven’t seen much to laugh at today.”

“You’ll laugh when you hear this,” assured Anne. And Marilla did laugh,
which showed how much her education had advanced since the adoption of
Anne. But she sighed immediately afterwards.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have told him that, although I heard a minister
say it to a child once. But he did aggravate me so. It was that night
you were at the Carmody concert and I was putting him to bed. He said
he didn’t see the good of praying until he got big enough to be of some
importance to God. Anne, I do not know what we are going to do with
that child. I never saw his beat. I’m feeling clean discouraged.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Marilla. Remember how bad I was when I came here.”

“Anne, you never were bad . . . _never_. I see that now, when I’ve
learned what real badness is. You were always getting into terrible
scrapes, I’ll admit, but your motive was always good. Davy is just bad
from sheer love of it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think it is real badness with him either,” pleaded
Anne. “It’s just mischief. And it is rather quiet for him here, you
know. He has no other boys to play with and his mind has to have
something to occupy it. Dora is so prim and proper she is no good for a
boy’s playmate. I really think it would be better to let them go to
school, Marilla.”

“No,” said Marilla resolutely, “my father always said that no child
should be cooped up in the four walls of a school until it was seven
years old, and Mr. Allan says the same thing. The twins can have a few
lessons at home but go to school they shan’t till they’re seven.”

“Well, we must try to reform Davy at home then,” said Anne cheerfully.
“With all his faults he’s really a dear little chap. I can’t help
loving him. Marilla, it may be a dreadful thing to say, but honestly, I
like Davy better than Dora, for all she’s so good.”

“I don’t know but that I do, myself,” confessed Marilla, “and it isn’t
fair, for Dora isn’t a bit of trouble. There couldn’t be a better child
and you’d hardly know she was in the house.”

“Dora is too good,” said Anne. “She’d behave just as well if there
wasn’t a soul to tell her what to do. She was born already brought up,
so she doesn’t need us; and I think,” concluded Anne, hitting on a very
vital truth, “that we always love best the people who need us. Davy
needs us badly.”

“He certainly needs something,” agreed Marilla. “Rachel Lynde would say
it was a good spanking.”




 XI
Facts and Fancies


“Teaching is really very interesting work,” wrote Anne to a Queen’s
Academy chum. “Jane says she thinks it is monotonous but I don’t find
it so. Something funny is almost sure to happen every day, and the
children say such amusing things. Jane says she punishes her pupils
when they make funny speeches, which is probably why she finds teaching
monotonous. This afternoon little Jimmy Andrews was trying to spell
‘speckled’ and couldn’t manage it. ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I can’t
spell it but I know what it means.’

“‘What?’ I asked.

“‘St. Clair Donnell’s face, miss.’

“St. Clair is certainly very much freckled, although I try to prevent
the others from commenting on it . . . for _I_ was freckled once and
well do I remember it. But I don’t think St. Clair minds. It was
because Jimmy called him ‘St. Clair’ that St. Clair pounded him on the
way home from school. I heard of the pounding, but not officially, so I
don’t think I’ll take any notice of it.

“Yesterday I was trying to teach Lottie Wright to do addition. I said,
‘If you had three candies in one hand and two in the other, how many
would you have altogether?’ ‘A mouthful,’ said Lottie. And in the
nature study class, when I asked them to give me a good reason why
toads shouldn’t be killed, Benjie Sloane gravely answered, ‘Because it
would rain the next day.’

“It’s so hard not to laugh, Stella. I have to save up all my amusement
until I get home, and Marilla says it makes her nervous to hear wild
shrieks of mirth proceeding from the east gable without any apparent
cause. She says a man in Grafton went insane once and that was how it
began.

“Did you know that Thomas a Becket was canonized as a _snake?_ Rose
Bell says he was . . . also that William Tyndale _wrote_ the New
Testament. Claude White says a ‘glacier’ is a man who puts in window
frames!

“I think the most difficult thing in teaching, as well as the most
interesting, is to get the children to tell you their real thoughts
about things. One stormy day last week I gathered them around me at
dinner hour and tried to get them to talk to me just as if I were one
of themselves. I asked them to tell me the things they most wanted.
Some of the answers were commonplace enough . . . dolls, ponies, and
skates. Others were decidedly original. Hester Boulter wanted ‘to wear
her Sunday dress every day and eat in the sitting room.’ Hannah Bell
wanted ‘to be good without having to take any trouble about it.’
Marjory White, aged ten, wanted to be a _widow_. Questioned why, she
gravely said that if you weren’t married people called you an old maid,
and if you were your husband bossed you; but if you were a widow
there’d be no danger of either. The most remarkable wish was Sally
Bell’s. She wanted a ‘honeymoon.’ I asked her if she knew what it was
and she said she thought it was an extra nice kind of bicycle because
her cousin in Montreal went on a honeymoon when he was married and he
had always had the very latest in bicycles!

“Another day I asked them all to tell me the naughtiest thing they had
ever done. I couldn’t get the older ones to do so, but the third class
answered quite freely. Eliza Bell had ‘set fire to her aunt’s carded
rolls.’ Asked if she meant to do it she said, ‘not altogether.’ She
just tried a little end to see how it would burn and the whole bundle
blazed up in a jiffy. Emerson Gillis had spent ten cents for candy when
he should have put it in his missionary box. Annetta Bell’s worst crime
was ‘eating some blueberries that grew in the graveyard.’ Willie White
had ‘slid down the sheephouse roof a lot of times with his Sunday
trousers on.’ ‘But I was punished for it ’cause I had to wear patched
pants to Sunday School all summer, and when you’re punished for a thing
you don’t have to repent of it,’ declared Willie.

“I wish you could see some of their compositions . . . so much do I
wish it that I’ll send you copies of some written recently. Last week I
told the fourth class I wanted them to write me letters about anything
they pleased, adding by way of suggestion that they might tell me of
some place they had visited or some interesting thing or person they
had seen. They were to write the letters on real note paper, seal them
in an envelope, and address them to me, all without any assistance from
other people. Last Friday morning I found a pile of letters on my desk
and that evening I realized afresh that teaching has its pleasures as
well as its pains. Those compositions would atone for much. Here is Ned
Clay’s, address, spelling, and grammar as originally penned.

“‘Miss teacher ShiRley
Green gabels.
p.e. Island can
birds


“‘Dear teacher I think I will write you a composition about birds.
birds is very useful animals. my cat catches birds. His name is William
but pa calls him tom. he is oll striped and he got one of his ears froz
of last winter. only for that he would be a good-looking cat. My unkle
has adopted a cat. it come to his house one day and woudent go away and
unkle says it has forgot more than most people ever knowed. he lets it
sleep on his rocking chare and my aunt says he thinks more of it than
he does of his children. that is not right. we ought to be kind to cats
and give them new milk but we ought not be better to them than to our
children. this is oll I can think of so no more at present from

edward blake ClaY.’”


“St. Clair Donnell’s is, as usual, short and to the point. St. Clair
never wastes words. I do not think he chose his subject or added the
postscript out of malice aforethought. It is just that he has not a
great deal of tact or imagination.”

“‘Dear Miss Shirley


“‘You told us to describe something strange we have seen. I will
describe the Avonlea Hall. It has two doors, an inside one and an
outside one. It has six windows and a chimney. It has two ends and two
sides. It is painted blue. That is what makes it strange. It is built
on the lower Carmody road. It is the third most important building in
Avonlea. The others are the church and the blacksmith shop. They hold
debating clubs and lectures in it and concerts.

“‘Yours truly,
“‘Jacob Donnell.


“‘P.S. The hall is a very bright blue.’”


“Annetta Bell’s letter was quite long, which surprised me, for writing
essays is not Annetta’s forte, and hers are generally as brief as St.
Clair’s. Annetta is a quiet little puss and a model of good behavior,
but there isn’t a shadow of originality in her. Here is her letter.—

“‘Dearest teacher,


“‘I think I will write you a letter to tell you how much I love you. I
love you with my whole heart and soul and mind . . . with all there is
of me to love . . . and I want to serve you for ever. It would be my
highest privilege. That is why I try so hard to be good in school and
learn my lessuns.

“‘You are so beautiful, my teacher. Your voice is like music and your
eyes are like pansies when the dew is on them. You are like a tall
stately queen. Your hair is like rippling gold. Anthony Pye says it is
red, but you needn’t pay any attention to Anthony.

“‘I have only known you for a few months but I cannot realize that
there was ever a time when I did not know you . . . when you had not
come into my life to bless and hallow it. I will always look back to
this year as the most wonderful in my life because it brought you to
me. Besides, it’s the year we moved to Avonlea from Newbridge. My love
for you has made my life very rich and it has kept me from much of harm
and evil. I owe this all to you, my sweetest teacher.

“‘I shall never forget how sweet you looked the last time I saw you in
that black dress with flowers in your hair. I shall see you like that
for ever, even when we are both old and gray. You will always be young
and fair to me, dearest teacher. I am thinking of you all the time. . .
in the morning and at the noontide and at the twilight. I love you when
you laugh and when you sigh . . . even when you look disdainful. I
never saw you look cross though Anthony Pye says you always look so but
I don’t wonder you look cross at him for he deserves it. I love you in
every dress . . . you seem more adorable in each new dress than the
last.

“‘Dearest teacher, good night. The sun has set and the stars are
shining . . . stars that are as bright and beautiful as your eyes. I
kiss your hands and face, my sweet. May God watch over you and protect
you from all harm.

“‘Your afecksionate pupil,
“‘Annetta Bell.’”


“This extraordinary letter puzzled me not a little. I knew Annetta
couldn’t have composed it any more than she could fly. When I went to
school the next day I took her for a walk down to the brook at recess
and asked her to tell me the truth about the letter. Annetta cried and
‘fessed up freely. She said she had never written a letter and she
didn’t know how to, or what to say, but there was a bundle of love
letters in her mother’s top bureau drawer which had been written to her
by an old ‘beau.’

“‘It wasn’t father,’ sobbed Annetta, ‘it was someone who was studying
for a minister, and so he could write lovely letters, but ma didn’t
marry him after all. She said she couldn’t make out what he was driving
at half the time. But I thought the letters were sweet and that I’d
just copy things out of them here and there to write you. I put
“teacher” where he put “lady” and I put in something of my own when I
could think of it and I changed some words. I put “dress” in place of
“mood.” I didn’t know just what a “mood” was but I s’posed it was
something to wear. I didn’t s’pose you’d know the difference. I don’t
see how you found out it wasn’t all mine. You must be awful clever,
teacher.’

“I told Annetta it was very wrong to copy another person’s letter and
pass it off as her own. But I’m afraid that all Annetta repented of was
being found out.

“‘And I do love you, teacher,’ she sobbed. ‘It was all true, even if
the minister wrote it first. I do love you with all my heart.’

“It’s very difficult to scold anybody properly under such
circumstances.

“Here is Barbara Shaw’s letter. I can’t reproduce the blots of the
original.

“‘Dear teacher,

“‘You said we might write about a visit. I never visited but once. It
was at my Aunt Mary’s last winter. My Aunt Mary is a very particular
woman and a great housekeeper. The first night I was there we were at
tea. I knocked over a jug and broke it. Aunt Mary said she had had that
jug ever since she was married and nobody had ever broken it before.
When we got up I stepped on her dress and all the gathers tore out of
the skirt. The next morning when I got up I hit the pitcher against the
basin and cracked them both and I upset a cup of tea on the tablecloth
at breakfast. When I was helping Aunt Mary with the dinner dishes I
dropped a china plate and it smashed. That evening I fell downstairs
and sprained my ankle and had to stay in bed for a week. I heard Aunt
Mary tell Uncle Joseph it was a mercy or I’d have broken everything in
the house. When I got better it was time to go home. I don’t like
visiting very much. I like going to school better, especially since I
came to Avonlea.

“‘Yours respectfully,
“‘Barbara Shaw.’”


“Willie White’s began,

“‘Respected Miss,


“‘I want to tell you about my Very Brave Aunt. She lives in Ontario and
one day she went out to the barn and saw a dog in the yard. The dog had
no business there so she got a stick and whacked him hard and drove him
into the barn and shut him up. Pretty soon a man came looking for an
inaginary lion’ (Query;—Did Willie mean a menagerie lion?) ‘that had
run away from a circus. And it turned out that the dog was a lion and
my Very Brave Aunt had druv him into the barn with a stick. It was a
wonder she was not et up but she was very brave. Emerson Gillis says if
she thought it was a dog she wasn’t any braver than if it really was a
dog. But Emerson is jealous because he hasn’t got a Brave Aunt himself,
nothing but uncles.’

“‘I have kept the best for the last. You laugh at me because I think
Paul is a genius but I am sure his letter will convince you that he is
a very uncommon child. Paul lives away down near the shore with his
grandmother and he has no playmates . . . no real playmates. You
remember our School Management professor told us that we must not have
‘favorites’ among our pupils, but I can’t help loving Paul Irving the
best of all mine. I don’t think it does any harm, though, for everybody
loves Paul, even Mrs. Lynde, who says she could never have believed
she’d get so fond of a Yankee. The other boys in school like him too.
There is nothing weak or girlish about him in spite of his dreams and
fancies. He is very manly and can hold his own in all games. He fought
St. Clair Donnell recently because St. Clair said the Union Jack was
away ahead of the Stars and Stripes as a flag. The result was a drawn
battle and a mutual agreement to respect each other’s patriotism
henceforth. St. Clair says he can hit the _hardest_ but Paul can hit
the _oftenest_.’”

“Paul’s Letter.

“‘My dear teacher,


“‘You told us we might write you about some interesting people we knew.
I think the most interesting people I know are my rock people and I
mean to tell you about them. I have never told anybody about them
except grandma and father but I would like to have you know about them
because you understand things. There are a great many people who do not
understand things so there is no use in telling them.’

“‘My rock people live at the shore. I used to visit them almost every
evening before the winter came. Now I can’t go till spring, but they
will be there, for people like that never change . . . that is the
splendid thing about them. Nora was the first one of them I got
acquainted with and so I think I love her the best. She lives in
Andrews’ Cove and she has black hair and black eyes, and she knows all
about the mermaids and the water kelpies. You ought to hear the stories
she can tell. Then there are the Twin Sailors. They don’t live
anywhere, they sail all the time, but they often come ashore to talk to
me. They are a pair of jolly tars and they have seen everything in the
world. . . and more than what is in the world. Do you know what
happened to the youngest Twin Sailor once? He was sailing and he sailed
right into a moonglade. A moonglade is the track the full moon makes on
the water when it is rising from the sea, you know, teacher. Well, the
youngest Twin Sailor sailed along the moonglade till he came right up
to the moon, and there was a little golden door in the moon and he
opened it and sailed right through. He had some wonderful adventures in
the moon but it would make this letter too long to tell them.’

“‘Then there is the Golden Lady of the cave. One day I found a big cave
down on the shore and I went away in and after a while I found the
Golden Lady. She has golden hair right down to her feet and her dress
is all glittering and glistening like gold that is alive. And she has a
golden harp and plays on it all day long . . . you can hear the music
any time along shore if you listen carefully but most people would
think it was only the wind among the rocks. I’ve never told Nora about
the Golden Lady. I was afraid it might hurt her feelings. It even hurt
her feelings if I talked too long with the Twin Sailors.’

“‘I always met the Twin Sailors at the Striped Rocks. The youngest Twin
Sailor is very good-tempered but the oldest Twin Sailor can look
dreadfully fierce at times. I have my suspicions about that oldest
Twin. I believe he’d be a pirate if he dared. There’s really something
very mysterious about him. He swore once and I told him if he ever did
it again he needn’t come ashore to talk to me because I’d promised
grandmother I’d never associate with anybody that swore. He was pretty
well scared, I can tell you, and he said if I would forgive him he
would take me to the sunset. So the next evening when I was sitting on
the Striped Rocks the oldest Twin came sailing over the sea in an
enchanted boat and I got in her. The boat was all pearly and rainbowy,
like the inside of the mussel shells, and her sail was like moonshine.
Well, we sailed right across to the sunset. Think of that, teacher,
I’ve been in the sunset. And what do you suppose it is? The sunset is a
land all flowers. We sailed into a great garden, and the clouds are
beds of flowers. We sailed into a great harbor, all the color of gold,
and I stepped right out of the boat on a big meadow all covered with
buttercups as big as roses. I stayed there for ever so long. It seemed
nearly a year but the Oldest Twin says it was only a few minutes. You
see, in the sunset land the time is ever so much longer than it is
here.’

“‘Your loving pupil,
“‘Paul Irving.’


“‘P. S. of course, this letter isn’t really true, teacher.

P.I.’”




 XII
A Jonah Day


It really began the night before with a restless, wakeful vigil of
grumbling toothache. When Anne arose in the dull, bitter winter morning
she felt that life was flat, stale, and unprofitable.

She went to school in no angelic mood. Her cheek was swollen and her
face ached. The schoolroom was cold and smoky, for the fire refused to
burn and the children were huddled about it in shivering groups. Anne
sent them to their seats with a sharper tone than she had ever used
before. Anthony Pye strutted to his with his usual impertinent swagger
and she saw him whisper something to his seat-mate and then glance at
her with a grin.

Never, so it seemed to Anne, had there been so many squeaky pencils as
there were that morning; and when Barbara Shaw came up to the desk with
a sum she tripped over the coal scuttle with disastrous results. The
coal rolled to every part of the room, her slate was broken into
fragments, and when she picked herself up, her face, stained with coal
dust, sent the boys into roars of laughter.

Anne turned from the second reader class which she was hearing.

“Really, Barbara,” she said icily, “if you cannot move without falling
over something you’d better remain in your seat. It is positively
disgraceful for a girl of your age to be so awkward.”

Poor Barbara stumbled back to her desk, her tears combining with the
coal dust to produce an effect truly grotesque. Never before had her
beloved, sympathetic teacher spoken to her in such a tone or fashion,
and Barbara was heartbroken. Anne herself felt a prick of conscience
but it only served to increase her mental irritation, and the second
reader class remember that lesson yet, as well as the unmerciful
infliction of arithmetic that followed. Just as Anne was snapping the
sums out St. Clair Donnell arrived breathlessly.

“You are half an hour late, St. Clair,” Anne reminded him frigidly.
“Why is this?”

“Please, miss, I had to help ma make a pudding for dinner ’cause we’re
expecting company and Clarice Almira’s sick,” was St. Clair’s answer,
given in a perfectly respectful voice but nevertheless provocative of
great mirth among his mates.

“Take your seat and work out the six problems on page eighty-four of
your arithmetic for punishment,” said Anne. St. Clair looked rather
amazed at her tone but he went meekly to his desk and took out his
slate. Then he stealthily passed a small parcel to Joe Sloane across
the aisle. Anne caught him in the act and jumped to a fatal conclusion
about that parcel.

Old Mrs. Hiram Sloane had lately taken to making and selling “nut
cakes” by way of adding to her scanty income. The cakes were specially
tempting to small boys and for several weeks Anne had had not a little
trouble in regard to them. On their way to school the boys would invest
their spare cash at Mrs. Hiram’s, bring the cakes along with them to
school, and, if possible, eat them and treat their mates during school
hours. Anne had warned them that if they brought any more cakes to
school they would be confiscated; and yet here was St. Clair Donnell
coolly passing a parcel of them, wrapped up in the blue and white
striped paper Mrs. Hiram used, under her very eyes.

“Joseph,” said Anne quietly, “bring that parcel here.”

Joe, startled and abashed, obeyed. He was a fat urchin who always
blushed and stuttered when he was frightened. Never did anybody look
more guilty than poor Joe at that moment.

“Throw it into the fire,” said Anne.

Joe looked very blank.

“P . . . p . . . p . . . lease, m . . . m . . . miss,” he began.

“Do as I tell you, Joseph, without any words about it.”

“B . . . b . . . but m . . . m . . . miss . . . th . . . th . . .
they’re . . .” gasped Joe in desperation.

“Joseph, are you going to obey me or are you _not?_” said Anne.

A bolder and more self-possessed lad than Joe Sloane would have been
overawed by her tone and the dangerous flash of her eyes. This was a
new Anne whom none of her pupils had ever seen before. Joe, with an
agonized glance at St. Clair, went to the stove, opened the big, square
front door, and threw the blue and white parcel in, before St. Clair,
who had sprung to his feet, could utter a word. Then he dodged back
just in time.

For a few moments the terrified occupants of Avonlea school did not
know whether it was an earthquake or a volcanic explosion that had
occurred. The innocent looking parcel which Anne had rashly supposed to
contain Mrs. Hiram’s nut cakes really held an assortment of
firecrackers and pinwheels for which Warren Sloane had sent to town by
St. Clair Donnell’s father the day before, intending to have a birthday
celebration that evening. The crackers went off in a thunderclap of
noise and the pinwheels bursting out of the door spun madly around the
room, hissing and spluttering. Anne dropped into her chair white with
dismay and all the girls climbed shrieking upon their desks. Joe Sloane
stood as one transfixed in the midst of the commotion and St. Clair,
helpless with laughter, rocked to and fro in the aisle. Prillie
Rogerson fainted and Annetta Bell went into hysterics.

It seemed a long time, although it was really only a few minutes,
before the last pinwheel subsided. Anne, recovering herself, sprang to
open doors and windows and let out the gas and smoke which filled the
room. Then she helped the girls carry the unconscious Prillie into the
porch, where Barbara Shaw, in an agony of desire to be useful, poured a
pailful of half frozen water over Prillie’s face and shoulders before
anyone could stop her.

It was a full hour before quiet was restored . . . but it was a quiet
that might be felt. Everybody realized that even the explosion had not
cleared the teacher’s mental atmosphere. Nobody, except Anthony Pye,
dared whisper a word. Ned Clay accidentally squeaked his pencil while
working a sum, caught Anne’s eye and wished the floor would open and
swallow him up. The geography class were whisked through a continent
with a speed that made them dizzy. The grammar class were parsed and
analyzed within an inch of their lives. Chester Sloane, spelling
“odoriferous” with two f’s, was made to feel that he could never live
down the disgrace of it, either in this world or that which is to come.

Anne knew that she had made herself ridiculous and that the incident
would be laughed over that night at a score of tea-tables, but the
knowledge only angered her further. In a calmer mood she could have
carried off the situation with a laugh but now that was impossible; so
she ignored it in icy disdain.

When Anne returned to the school after dinner all the children were as
usual in their seats and every face was bent studiously over a desk
except Anthony Pye’s. He peered across his book at Anne, his black eyes
sparkling with curiosity and mockery. Anne twitched open the drawer of
her desk in search of chalk and under her very hand a lively mouse
sprang out of the drawer, scampered over the desk, and leaped to the
floor.

Anne screamed and sprang back, as if it had been a snake, and Anthony
Pye laughed aloud.

Then a silence fell . . . a very creepy, uncomfortable silence. Annetta
Bell was of two minds whether to go into hysterics again or not,
especially as she didn’t know just where the mouse had gone. But she
decided not to. Who could take any comfort out of hysterics with a
teacher so white-faced and so blazing-eyed standing before one?

“Who put that mouse in my desk?” said Anne. Her voice was quite low but
it made a shiver go up and down Paul Irving’s spine. Joe Sloane caught
her eye, felt responsible from the crown of his head to the sole of his
feet, but stuttered out wildly,

“N . . . n . . . not m . . . m . . . me t . . . t . . . teacher, n . .
. n . . . not m . . . m . . . me.”

Anne paid no attention to the wretched Joseph. She looked at Anthony
Pye, and Anthony Pye looked back unabashed and unashamed.

“Anthony, was it you?”

“Yes, it was,” said Anthony insolently.

Anne took her pointer from her desk. It was a long, heavy hardwood
pointer.

“Come here, Anthony.”

It was far from being the most severe punishment Anthony Pye had ever
undergone. Anne, even the stormy-souled Anne she was at that moment,
could not have punished any child cruelly. But the pointer nipped
keenly and finally Anthony’s bravado failed him; he winced and the
tears came to his eyes.

Anne, conscience-stricken, dropped the pointer and told Anthony to go
to his seat. She sat down at her desk feeling ashamed, repentant, and
bitterly mortified. Her quick anger was gone and she would have given
much to have been able to seek relief in tears. So all her boasts had
come to this . . . she had actually whipped one of her pupils. How Jane
would triumph! And how Mr. Harrison would chuckle! But worse than this,
bitterest thought of all, she had lost her last chance of winning
Anthony Pye. Never would he like her now.

Anne, by what somebody has called “a Herculaneum effort,” kept back her
tears until she got home that night. Then she shut herself in the east
gable room and wept all her shame and remorse and disappointment into
her pillows . . . wept so long that Marilla grew alarmed, invaded the
room, and insisted on knowing what the trouble was.

“The trouble is, I’ve got things the matter with my conscience,” sobbed
Anne. “Oh, this has been such a Jonah day, Marilla. I’m so ashamed of
myself. I lost my temper and whipped Anthony Pye.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Marilla with decision. “It’s what you
should have done long ago.”

“Oh, no, no, Marilla. And I don’t see how I can ever look those
children in the face again. I feel that I have humiliated myself to the
very dust. You don’t know how cross and hateful and horrid I was. I
can’t forget the expression in Paul Irving’s eyes . . . he looked so
surprised and disappointed. Oh, Marilla, I _have_ tried so hard to be
patient and to win Anthony’s liking . . . and now it has all gone for
nothing.”

Marilla passed her hard work-worn hand over the girl’s glossy, tumbled
hair with a wonderful tenderness. When Anne’s sobs grew quieter she
said, very gently for her,

“You take things too much to heart, Anne. We all make mistakes . . .
but people forget them. And Jonah days come to everybody. As for
Anthony Pye, why need you care if he does dislike you? He is the only
one.”

“I can’t help it. I want everybody to love me and it hurts me so when
anybody doesn’t. And Anthony never will now. Oh, I just made an idiot
of myself today, Marilla. I’ll tell you the whole story.”

Marilla listened to the whole story, and if she smiled at certain parts
of it Anne never knew. When the tale was ended she said briskly,

“Well, never mind. This day’s done and there’s a new one coming
tomorrow, with no mistakes in it yet, as you used to say yourself. Just
come downstairs and have your supper. You’ll see if a good cup of tea
and those plum puffs I made today won’t hearten you up.”

“Plum puffs won’t minister to a mind diseased,” said Anne
disconsolately; but Marilla thought it a good sign that she had
recovered sufficiently to adapt a quotation.

The cheerful supper table, with the twins’ bright faces, and Marilla’s
matchless plum puffs . . . of which Davy ate four . . . did “hearten
her up” considerably after all. She had a good sleep that night and
awakened in the morning to find herself and the world transformed. It
had snowed softly and thickly all through the hours of darkness and the
beautiful whiteness, glittering in the frosty sunshine, looked like a
mantle of charity cast over all the mistakes and humiliations of the
past.

“Every morn is a fresh beginning,
Every morn is the world made new,”


sang Anne, as she dressed.

Owing to the snow she had to go around by the road to school and she
thought it was certainly an impish coincidence that Anthony Pye should
come ploughing along just as she left the Green Gables lane. She felt
as guilty as if their positions were reversed; but to her unspeakable
astonishment Anthony not only lifted his cap . . . which he had never
done before . . . but said easily,

“Kind of bad walking, ain’t it? Can I take those books for you,
teacher?”

Anne surrendered her books and wondered if she could possibly be awake.
Anthony walked on in silence to the school, but when Anne took her
books she smiled down at him . . . not the stereotyped “kind” smile she
had so persistently assumed for his benefit but a sudden outflashing of
good comradeship. Anthony smiled . . . no, if the truth must be told,
Anthony _grinned_ back. A grin is not generally supposed to be a
respectful thing; yet Anne suddenly felt that if she had not yet won
Anthony’s liking she had, somehow or other, won his respect.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde came up the next Saturday and confirmed this.

“Well, Anne, I guess you’ve won over Anthony Pye, that’s what. He says
he believes you are some good after all, even if you are a girl. Says
that whipping you gave him was ‘just as good as a man’s.’”

“I never expected to win him by whipping him, though,” said Anne, a
little mournfully, feeling that her ideals had played her false
somewhere. “It doesn’t seem right. I’m _sure_ my theory of kindness
_can’t_ be wrong.”

“No, but the Pyes are an exception to every known rule, that’s what,”
declared Mrs. Rachel with conviction.

Mr. Harrison said, “Thought you’d come to it,” when he heard it, and
Jane rubbed it in rather unmercifully.




 XIII
A Golden Picnic


Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables,
just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the Haunted
Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad’s Bubble, where tiny
ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from
a nap.

“I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my
birthday on Saturday,” said Anne.

“Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!”

“That wasn’t my fault,” laughed Anne. “If my parents had consulted me
it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be born in
spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the world with
the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their
foster sister. But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate
my birthday in the spring. Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane
will be home. We’ll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden
day making the acquaintance of the spring. We none of us really know
her yet, but we’ll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else. I
want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a
conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have
never really been _seen_ although they may have been _looked_ at. We’ll
make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in
our hearts.”

“It _sounds_ awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of
Anne’s magic of words. “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”

“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities. “And
I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare
lunch. I’m going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things
that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and
lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and
buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re _not_
very poetical.”

Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and
blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow
and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate,
flower-starred green.

Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the
spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls,
basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a
fringing woodland of birch and fir. Their blithe voices and laughter
echoed down to him.

“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was
saying, with true Anneish philosophy. “Let’s try to make this a really
golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight.
We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. ‘Begone, dull
care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school
yesterday.”

“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.

“Oh, I know the expression . . . I’ve felt it often enough on my own
face. But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear. It will keep till
Monday . . . or if it doesn’t so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see
that patch of violets! There’s something for memory’s picture gallery.
When I’m eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . . I shall shut my eyes
and see those violets just as I see them now. That’s the first good
gift our day has given us.”

“If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet,” said
Priscilla.

Anne glowed.

“I’m so glad you _spoke_ that thought, Priscilla, instead of just
thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more
interesting place . . . although it _is_ very interesting anyhow . . .
if people spoke out their real thoughts.”

“It would be too hot to hold some folks,” quoted Jane sagely.

“I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking
nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are
going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just
what comes into her head. _That_ is conversation. Here’s a little path
I never saw before. Let’s explore it.”

The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single
file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs
were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were
smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing
things.

“What a lot of elephant’s ears,” exclaimed Diana. “I’m going to pick a
big bunch, they’re so pretty.”

“How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a
dreadful name?” asked Priscilla.

“Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at
all or else far too much,” said Anne, “Oh, girls, look at that!”

“That” was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade
where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up and
its place filled with a rank growth of ferns; but now it was a
glimmering placid sheet, round as a saucer and clear as crystal. A ring
of slender young birches encircled it and little ferns fringed its
margin.

“_How_ sweet!” said Jane.

“Let us dance around it like wood-nymphs,” cried Anne, dropping her
basket and extending her hands.

But the dance was not a success for the ground was boggy and Jane’s
rubbers came off.

“You can’t be a wood-nymph if you have to wear rubbers,” was her
decision.

“Well, we must name this place before we leave it,” said Anne, yielding
to the indisputable logic of facts. “Everybody suggest a name and we’ll
draw lots. Diana?”

“Birch Pool,” suggested Diana promptly.

“Crystal Lake,” said Jane.

Anne, standing behind them, implored Priscilla with her eyes not to
perpetrate another such name and Priscilla rose to the occasion with
“Glimmer-glass.” Anne’s selection was “The Fairies’ Mirror.”

The names were written on strips of birch bark with a pencil
Schoolma’am Jane produced from her pocket, and placed in Anne’s hat.
Then Priscilla shut her eyes and drew one. “Crystal Lake,” read Jane
triumphantly. Crystal Lake it was, and if Anne thought that chance had
played the pool a shabby trick she did not say so.

Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young
green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture. Across it they
found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to
explore it also. It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty
surprises. First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of
wild cherry trees all in bloom. The girls swung their hats on their
arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms. Then the
lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and
dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of
sky or sunlight to be seen.

“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne. “They are
impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not
allowed to do evil in the spring. There was one peeping at us around
that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big
freckly toadstool we just passed? The good fairies always dwell in the
sunshiny places.”

“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane. “Wouldn’t it be nice to
have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one? What would you
wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted? I’d wish to be rich
and beautiful and clever.”

“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.

“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla. Anne thought of her hair
and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.

“I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and
all our lives,” she said.

“But that,” said Priscilla, “would be just wishing this world were like
heaven.”

“Only like a part of heaven. In the other parts there would be summer
and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too. I think I want
glittering snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes. Don’t
you, Jane?”

“I . . . I don’t know,” said Jane uncomfortably. Jane was a good girl,
a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her
profession and believed everything she had been taught. But she never
thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.

“Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses
every day in heaven,” laughed Diana.

“And didn’t you tell her we would?” asked Anne.

“Mercy, no! I told her we wouldn’t be thinking of dresses at all
there.”

“Oh, I think we will . . . a _little_,” said Anne earnestly. “There’ll
be plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more
important things. I believe we’ll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I
suppose _raiment_ would be a more suitable way of speaking. I shall
want to wear pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me
that long to get tired of it, I feel sure. I do love pink so and I can
never wear it in _this_ world.”

Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open where a
log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit
beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the
leaves fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous
sunshine. Then more wild cherries, and a little valley of lissome firs,
and then a hill so steep that the girls lost their breath climbing it;
but when they reached the top and came out into the open the prettiest
surprise of all awaited them.

Beyond were the “back fields” of the farms that ran out to the upper
Carmody road. Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open
to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden . . . or what had
once been a garden. A tumbledown stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and
grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry
trees, white as a snowdrift. There were traces of old paths still and a
double line of rosebushes through the middle; but all the rest of the
space was a sheet of yellow and white narcissi, in their airiest, most
lavish, wind-swayed bloom above the lush green grasses.

“Oh, how perfectly lovely!” three of the girls cried. Anne only gazed
in eloquent silence.

“How in the world does it happen that there ever was a garden back
here?” said Priscilla in amazement.

“It must be Hester Gray’s garden,” said Diana. “I’ve heard mother speak
of it but I never saw it before, and I wouldn’t have supposed that it
could be in existence still. You’ve heard the story, Anne?”

“No, but the name seems familiar to me.”

“Oh, you’ve seen it in the graveyard. She is buried down there in the
poplar corner. You know the little brown stone with the opening gates
carved on it and ‘Sacred to the memory of Hester Gray, aged
twenty-two.’ Jordan Gray is buried right beside her but there’s no
stone to him. It’s a wonder Marilla never told you about it, Anne. To
be sure, it happened thirty years ago and everybody has forgotten.”

“Well, if there’s a story we must have it,” said Anne. “Let’s sit right
down here among the narcissi and Diana will tell it. Why, girls, there
are hundreds of them . . . they’ve spread over everything. It looks as
if the garden were carpeted with moonshine and sunshine combined. This
is a discovery worth making. To think that I’ve lived within a mile of
this place for six years and have never seen it before! Now, Diana.”

“Long ago,” began Diana, “this farm belonged to old Mr. David Gray. He
didn’t live on it . . . he lived where Silas Sloane lives now. He had
one son, Jordan, and he went up to Boston one winter to work and while
he was there he fell in love with a girl named Hester Murray. She was
working in a store and she hated it. She’d been brought up in the
country and she always wanted to get back. When Jordan asked her to
marry him she said she would if he’d take her away to some quiet spot
where she’d see nothing but fields and trees. So he brought her to
Avonlea. Mrs. Lynde said he was taking a fearful risk in marrying a
Yankee, and it’s certain that Hester was very delicate and a very poor
housekeeper; but mother says she was very pretty and sweet and Jordan
just worshipped the ground she walked on. Well, Mr. Gray gave Jordan
this farm and he built a little house back here and Jordan and Hester
lived in it for four years. She never went out much and hardly anybody
went to see her except mother and Mrs. Lynde. Jordan made her this
garden and she was crazy about it and spent most of her time in it. She
wasn’t much of a housekeeper but she had a knack with flowers. And then
she got sick. Mother says she thinks she was in consumption before she
ever came here. She never really laid up but just grew weaker and
weaker all the time. Jordan wouldn’t have anybody to wait on her. He
did it all himself and mother says he was as tender and gentle as a
woman. Every day he’d wrap her in a shawl and carry her out to the
garden and she’d lie there on a bench quite happy. They say she used to
make Jordan kneel down by her every night and morning and pray with her
that she might die out in the garden when the time came. And her prayer
was answered. One day Jordan carried her out to the bench and then he
picked all the roses that were out and heaped them over her; and she
just smiled up at him . . . and closed her eyes . . . and that,”
concluded Diana softly, “was the end.”

“Oh, what a dear story,” sighed Anne, wiping away her tears.

“What became of Jordan?” asked Priscilla.

“He sold the farm after Hester died and went back to Boston. Mr. Jabez
Sloane bought the farm and hauled the little house out to the road.
Jordan died about ten years after and he was brought home and buried
beside Hester.”

“I can’t understand how she could have wanted to live back here, away
from everything,” said Jane.

“Oh, I can easily understand _that_,” said Anne thoughtfully. “I
wouldn’t want it myself for a steady thing, because, although I love
the fields and woods, I love people too. But I can understand it in
Hester. She was tired to death of the noise of the big city and the
crowds of people always coming and going and caring nothing for her.
She just wanted to escape from it all to some still, green, friendly
place where she could rest. And she got just what she wanted, which is
something very few people do, I believe. She had four beautiful years
before she died. . . four years of perfect happiness, so I think she
was to be envied more than pitied. And then to shut your eyes and fall
asleep among roses, with the one you loved best on earth smiling down
at you . . . oh, I think it was beautiful!”

“She set out those cherry trees over there,” said Diana. “She told
mother she’d never live to eat their fruit, but she wanted to think
that something she had planted would go on living and helping to make
the world beautiful after she was dead.”

“I’m so glad we came this way,” said Anne, the shining-eyed. “This is
my adopted birthday, you know, and this garden and its story is the
birthday gift it has given me. Did your mother ever tell you what
Hester Gray looked like, Diana?”

“No . . . only just that she was pretty.”

“I’m rather glad of that, because I can imagine what she looked like,
without being hampered by facts. I think she was very slight and small,
with softly curling dark hair and big, sweet, timid brown eyes, and a
little wistful, pale face.”

The girls left their baskets in Hester’s garden and spent the rest of
the afternoon rambling in the woods and fields surrounding it,
discovering many pretty nooks and lanes. When they got hungry they had
lunch in the prettiest spot of all . . . on the steep bank of a
gurgling brook where white birches shot up out of long feathery
grasses. The girls sat down by the roots and did full justice to Anne’s
dainties, even the unpoetical sandwiches being greatly appreciated by
hearty, unspoiled appetites sharpened by all the fresh air and exercise
they had enjoyed. Anne had brought glasses and lemonade for her guests,
but for her own part drank cold brook water from a cup fashioned out of
birch bark. The cup leaked, and the water tasted of earth, as brook
water is apt to do in spring; but Anne thought it more appropriate to
the occasion than lemonade.

“Look do you see that poem?” she said suddenly, pointing.

“Where?” Jane and Diana stared, as if expecting to see Runic rhymes on
the birch trees.

“There . . . down in the brook . . . that old green, mossy log with the
water flowing over it in those smooth ripples that look as if they’d
been combed, and that single shaft of sunshine falling right athwart
it, far down into the pool. Oh, it’s the most beautiful poem I ever
saw.”

“I should rather call it a picture,” said Jane. “A poem is lines and
verses.”

“Oh dear me, no.” Anne shook her head with its fluffy wild cherry
coronal positively. “The lines and verses are only the outward garments
of the poem and are no more really it than your ruffles and flounces
are _you_, Jane. The real poem is the soul within them . . . and that
beautiful bit is the soul of an unwritten poem. It is not every day one
sees a soul . . . even of a poem.”

“I wonder what a soul . . . a person’s soul . . . would look like,”
said Priscilla dreamily.

“Like that, I should think,” answered Anne, pointing to a radiance of
sifted sunlight streaming through a birch tree. “Only with shape and
features of course. I like to fancy souls as being made of light. And
some are all shot through with rosy stains and quivers . . . and some
have a soft glitter like moonlight on the sea . . . and some are pale
and transparent like mist at dawn.”

“I read somewhere once that souls were like flowers,” said Priscilla.

“Then your soul is a golden narcissus,” said Anne, “and Diana’s is like
a red, red rose. Jane’s is an apple blossom, pink and wholesome and
sweet.”

“And your own is a white violet, with purple streaks in its heart,”
finished Priscilla.

Jane whispered to Diana that she really could not understand what they
were talking about. Could she?

The girls went home by the light of a calm golden sunset, their baskets
filled with narcissus blossoms from Hester’s garden, some of which Anne
carried to the cemetery next day and laid upon Hester’s grave. Minstrel
robins were whistling in the firs and the frogs were singing in the
marshes. All the basins among the hills were brimmed with topaz and
emerald light.

“Well, we have had a lovely time after all,” said Diana, as if she had
hardly expected to have it when she set out.

“It has been a truly golden day,” said Priscilla.

“I’m really awfully fond of the woods myself,” said Jane.

Anne said nothing. She was looking afar into the western sky and
thinking of little Hester Gray.




 XIV
A Danger Averted


Anne, walking home from the post office one Friday evening, was joined
by Mrs. Lynde, who was as usual cumbered with all the cares of church
and state.

“I’ve just been down to Timothy Cotton’s to see if I could get Alice
Louise to help me for a few days,” she said. “I had her last week, for,
though she’s too slow to stop quick, she’s better than nobody. But
she’s sick and can’t come. Timothy’s sitting there, too, coughing and
complaining. He’s been dying for ten years and he’ll go on dying for
ten years more. That kind can’t even die and have done with it . . .
they can’t stick to anything, even to being sick, long enough to finish
it. They’re a terrible shiftless family and what is to become of them I
don’t know, but perhaps Providence does.”

Mrs. Lynde sighed as if she rather doubted the extent of Providential
knowledge on the subject.

“Marilla was in about her eyes again Tuesday, wasn’t she? What did the
specialist think of them?” she continued.

“He was much pleased,” said Anne brightly. “He says there is a great
improvement in them and he thinks the danger of her losing her sight
completely is past. But he says she’ll never be able to read much or do
any fine hand-work again. How are your preparations for your bazaar
coming on?”

The Ladies’ Aid Society was preparing for a fair and supper, and Mrs.
Lynde was the head and front of the enterprise.

“Pretty well . . . and that reminds me. Mrs. Allan thinks it would be
nice to fix up a booth like an old-time kitchen and serve a supper of
baked beans, doughnuts, pie, and so on. We’re collecting old-fashioned
fixings everywhere. Mrs. Simon Fletcher is going to lend us her
mother’s braided rugs and Mrs. Levi Boulter some old chairs and Aunt
Mary Shaw will lend us her cupboard with the glass doors. I suppose
Marilla will let us have her brass candlesticks? And we want all the
old dishes we can get. Mrs. Allan is specially set on having a real
blue willow ware platter if we can find one. But nobody seems to have
one. Do you know where we could get one?”

“Miss Josephine Barry has one. I’ll write and ask her if she’ll lend it
for the occasion,” said Anne.

“Well, I wish you would. I guess we’ll have the supper in about a
fortnight’s time. Uncle Abe Andrews is prophesying rain and storms for
about that time; and that’s a pretty sure sign we’ll have fine
weather.”

The said “Uncle Abe,” it may be mentioned, was at least like other
prophets in that he had small honor in his own country. He was, in
fact, considered in the light of a standing joke, for few of his
weather predictions were ever fulfilled. Mr. Elisha Wright, who labored
under the impression that he was a local wit, used to say that nobody
in Avonlea ever thought of looking in the Charlottetown dailies for
weather probabilities. No; they just asked Uncle Abe what it was going
to be tomorrow and expected the opposite. Nothing daunted, Uncle Abe
kept on prophesying.

“We want to have the fair over before the election comes off,”
continued Mrs. Lynde, “for the candidates will be sure to come and
spend lots of money. The Tories are bribing right and left, so they
might as well be given a chance to spend their money honestly for
once.”

Anne was a red-hot Conservative, out of loyalty to Matthew’s memory,
but she said nothing. She knew better than to get Mrs. Lynde started on
politics. She had a letter for Marilla, postmarked from a town in
British Columbia.

“It’s probably from the children’s uncle,” she said excitedly, when she
got home. “Oh, Marilla, I wonder what he says about them.”

“The best plan might be to open it and see,” said Marilla curtly. A
close observer might have thought that she was excited also, but she
would rather have died than show it.

Anne tore open the letter and glanced over the somewhat untidy and
poorly written contents.

“He says he can’t take the children this spring . . . he’s been sick
most of the winter and his wedding is put off. He wants to know if we
can keep them till the fall and he’ll try and take them then. We will,
of course, won’t we Marilla?”

“I don’t see that there is anything else for us to do,” said Marilla
rather grimly, although she felt a secret relief. “Anyhow they’re not
so much trouble as they were . . . or else we’ve got used to them. Davy
has improved a great deal.”

“His _manners_ are certainly much better,” said Anne cautiously, as if
she were not prepared to say as much for his morals.

Anne had come home from school the previous evening, to find Marilla
away at an Aid meeting, Dora asleep on the kitchen sofa, and Davy in
the sitting room closet, blissfully absorbing the contents of a jar of
Marilla’s famous yellow plum preserves . . . “company jam,” Davy called
it . . . which he had been forbidden to touch. He looked very guilty
when Anne pounced on him and whisked him out of the closet.

“Davy Keith, don’t you know that it is very wrong of you to be eating
that jam, when you were told never to meddle with anything in _that_
closet?”

“Yes, I knew it was wrong,” admitted Davy uncomfortably, “but plum jam
is awful nice, Anne. I just peeped in and it looked so good I thought
I’d take just a weeny taste. I stuck my finger in . . .” Anne groaned .
. . “and licked it clean. And it was so much gooder than I’d ever
thought that I got a spoon and just _sailed in_.”

Anne gave him such a serious lecture on the sin of stealing plum jam
that Davy became conscience stricken and promised with repentant kisses
never to do it again.

“Anyhow, there’ll be plenty of jam in heaven, that’s one comfort,” he
said complacently.

Anne nipped a smile in the bud.

“Perhaps there will . . . if we want it,” she said, “But what makes you
think so?”

“Why, it’s in the catechism,” said Davy.

“Oh, no, there is nothing like _that_ in the catechism, Davy.”

“But I tell you there is,” persisted Davy. “It was in that question
Marilla taught me last Sunday. ‘Why should we love God?’ It says,
‘Because He makes preserves, and redeems us.’ Preserves is just a holy
way of saying jam.”

“I must get a drink of water,” said Anne hastily. When she came back it
cost her some time and trouble to explain to Davy that a certain comma
in the said catechism question made a great deal of difference in the
meaning.

“Well, I thought it was too good to be true,” he said at last, with a
sigh of disappointed conviction. “And besides, I didn’t see when He’d
find time to make jam if it’s one endless Sabbath day, as the hymn
says. I don’t believe I want to go to heaven. Won’t there ever be any
Saturdays in heaven, Anne?”

“Yes, Saturdays, and every other kind of beautiful days. And every day
in heaven will be more beautiful than the one before it, Davy,” assured
Anne, who was rather glad that Marilla was not by to be shocked.
Marilla, it is needless to say, was bringing the twins up in the good
old ways of theology and discouraged all fanciful speculations
thereupon. Davy and Dora were taught a hymn, a catechism question, and
t

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