Anne of Avonlea

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.