“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 DonNELL woman, she’ll get no DonNELLing from me, I can assure you.  The name is DONnell 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.”