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
I An Irate Neighbor
II Selling in Haste and Repenting at Leisure
III Mr. Harrison at Home
IV Different Opinions47
V A Full-fledged Schoolma’am
VI All Sorts and Conditions of Men . . . and women
VII The Pointing of Duty
VIII Marilla Adopts Twins
IX A Question of Color
X Davy in Search of a Sensation
XI Facts and Fancies
XII A Jonah Day
XIII A Golden Picnic
XIV A Danger Averted
XV The Beginning of Vacation
XVI The Substance of Things Hoped For
XVII A Chapter of Accidents
XVIII An Adventure on the Tory Road
XIX Just a Happy Day
XX The Way It Often Happens
XXI Sweet Miss Lavendar
XXII Odds and Ends
XXIII Miss Lavendar’s Romance
XXIV A Prophet in His Own Country
XXV An Avonlea Scandal
XXVI Around the Bend
XXVII An Afternoon at the Stone House
XXVIII The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace
XXIX Poetry and Prose
XXX A Wedding at the Stone House
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
