“Yes, I think she will,” said Anne.
“Oh, Anne,” protested Diana, with a rather
shocked smile.
“Well, why not, Diana?” asked Anne seriously.
“Do you think we’ll never laugh in heaven?”
“Oh—I—I don’t know”
floundered Diana. “It doesn’t seem
just right, somehow. You know it’s rather
dreadful to laugh in church.”
“But heaven won’t be like church—all
the time,” said Anne.
“I hope it ain’t,” said Davy emphatically.
“If it is I don’t want to go. Church
is awful dull. Anyway, I don’t mean to go
for ever so long. I mean to live to be a hundred
years old, like Mr. Thomas Blewett of White Sands.
He says he’s lived so long ’cause he always
smoked tobacco and it killed all the germs. Can
I smoke tobacco pretty soon, Anne?”
“No, Davy, I hope you’ll never use tobacco,”
said Anne absently.
“What’ll you feel like if the germs kill
me then?” demanded Davy.
A Dream Turned Upside Down
“Just one more week and we go back to Redmond,”
said Anne. She was happy at the thought of returning
to work, classes and Redmond friends. Pleasing
visions were also being woven around Patty’s
Place. There was a warm pleasant sense of home
in the thought of it, even though she had never lived
there.
But the summer had been a very happy one, too—a
time of glad living with summer suns and skies, a
time of keen delight in wholesome things; a time of
renewing and deepening of old friendships; a time in
which she had learned to live more nobly, to work
more patiently, to play more heartily.
“All life lessons are not learned at college,”
she thought. “Life teaches them everywhere.”
But alas, the final week of that pleasant vacation
was spoiled for Anne, by one of those impish happenings
which are like a dream turned upside down.
“Been writing any more stories lately?”
inquired Mr. Harrison genially one evening when Anne
was taking tea with him and Mrs. Harrison.
“No,” answered Anne, rather crisply.
“Well, no offense meant. Mrs. Hiram Sloane
told me the other day that a big envelope addressed
to the Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Company of
Montreal had been dropped into the post office box
a month ago, and she suspicioned that somebody was
trying for the prize they’d offered for the
best story that introduced the name of their baking
powder. She said it wasn’t addressed in
your writing, but I thought maybe it was you.”
“Indeed, no! I saw the prize offer, but
I’d never dream of competing for it. I
think it would be perfectly disgraceful to write a
story to advertise a baking powder. It would
be almost as bad as Judson Parker’s patent medicine
fence.”
So spake Anne loftily, little dreaming of the valley
of humiliation awaiting her. That very evening
Diana popped into the porch gable, bright-eyed and
rosy cheeked, carrying a letter.
