“Oh, don’t say that, Marilla.  Remember how bad I was when I came here.”

“Anne, you never were bad . . .  Never.  I see that now, when I’ve learned what real badness is.  You were always getting into terrible scrapes, I’ll admit, but your motive was always good.  Davy is just bad from sheer love of it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think it is real badness with him either,” pleaded Anne.  “It’s just mischief.  And it is rather quiet for him here, you know.  He has no other boys to play with and his mind has to have something to occupy it.  Dora is so prim and proper she is no good for a boy’s playmate.  I really think it would be better to let them go to school, Marilla.”

“No,” said Marilla resolutely, “my father always said that no child should be cooped up in the four walls of a school until it was seven years old, and Mr. Allan says the same thing.  The twins can have a few lessons at home but go to school they shan’t till they’re seven.”

“Well, we must try to reform Davy at home then,” said Anne cheerfully.  “With all his faults he’s really a dear little chap.  I can’t help loving him.  Marilla, it may be a dreadful thing to say, but honestly, I like Davy better than Dora, for all she’s so good.”

“I don’t know but that I do, myself,” confessed Marilla, “and it isn’t fair, for Dora isn’t a bit of trouble.  There couldn’t be a better child and you’d hardly know she was in the house.”

“Dora is too good,” said Anne.  “She’d behave just as well if there wasn’t a soul to tell her what to do.  She was born already brought up, so she doesn’t need us; and I think,” concluded Anne, hitting on a very vital truth, “that we always love best the people who need us.  Davy needs us badly.”

“He certainly needs something,” agreed Marilla.  “Rachel Lynde would say it was a good spanking.”

XI

Facts and Fancies

“Teaching is really very interesting work,” wrote Anne to a Queen’s Academy chum.  “Jane says she thinks it is monotonous but I don’t find it so.  Something funny is almost sure to happen every day, and the children say such amusing things.  Jane says she punishes her pupils when they make funny speeches, which is probably why she finds teaching monotonous.  This afternoon little Jimmy Andrews was trying to spell ‘speckled’ and couldn’t manage it.  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ’I can’t spell it but I know what it means.’

“‘What?’ I asked.

“‘St. Clair Donnell’s face, miss.’

“St. Clair is certainly very much freckled, although I try to prevent the others from commenting on it . . . for I was freckled once and well do I remember it.  But I don’t think St. Clair minds.  It was because Jimmy called him ‘St. Clair’ that St. Clair pounded him on the way home from school.  I heard of the pounding, but not officially, so I don’t think I’ll take any notice of it.

“Yesterday I was trying to teach Lottie Wright to do addition.  I said, ’If you had three candies in one hand and two in the other, how many would you have altogether?’ ‘A mouthful,’ said Lottie.  And in the nature study class, when I asked them to give me a good reason why toads shouldn’t be killed, Benjie Sloane gravely answered, ’Because it would rain the next day.’