“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.”
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.”
