To

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

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