“It’s so hard not to laugh, Stella.  I have to save up all my amusement until I get home, and Marilla says it makes her nervous to hear wild shrieks of mirth proceeding from the east gable without any apparent cause.  She says a man in Grafton went insane once and that was how it began.

“Did you know that Thomas a Becket was canonized as a snake?  Rose Bell says he was . . . also that William Tyndale wrote the New Testament.  Claude White says a ‘glacier’ is a man who puts in window frames!

“I think the most difficult thing in teaching, as well as the most interesting, is to get the children to tell you their real thoughts about things.  One stormy day last week I gathered them around me at dinner hour and tried to get them to talk to me just as if I were one of themselves.  I asked them to tell me the things they most wanted.  Some of the answers were commonplace enough . . . dolls, ponies, and skates.  Others were decidedly original.  Hester Boulter wanted ’to wear her Sunday dress every day and eat in the sitting room.’  Hannah Bell wanted ‘to be good without having to take any trouble about it.’  Marjory White, aged ten, wanted to be a widow.  Questioned why, she gravely said that if you weren’t married people called you an old maid, and if you were your husband bossed you; but if you were a widow there’d be no danger of either.  The most remarkable wish was Sally Bell’s.  She wanted a ‘honeymoon.’  I asked her if she knew what it was and she said she thought it was an extra nice kind of bicycle because her cousin in Montreal went on a honeymoon when he was married and he had always had the very latest in bicycles!

“Another day I asked them all to tell me the naughtiest thing they had ever done.  I couldn’t get the older ones to do so, but the third class answered quite freely.  Eliza Bell had ’set fire to her aunt’s carded rolls.’  Asked if she meant to do it she said, ‘not altogether.’  She just tried a little end to see how it would burn and the whole bundle blazed up in a jiffy.  Emerson Gillis had spent ten cents for candy when he should have put it in his missionary box.  Annetta Bell’s worst crime was ‘eating some blueberries that grew in the graveyard.’  Willie White had ’slid down the sheephouse roof a lot of times with his Sunday trousers on.’  ’But I was punished for it ’cause I had to wear patched pants to Sunday School all summer, and when you’re punished for a thing you don’t have to repent of it,’ declared Willie.

“I wish you could see some of their compositions . . . so much do I wish it that I’ll send you copies of some written recently.  Last week I told the fourth class I wanted them to write me letters about anything they pleased, adding by way of suggestion that they might tell me of some place they had visited or some interesting thing or person they had seen.  They were to write the letters on real note paper, seal them in an envelope, and address them to me, all without any assistance from other people.  Last Friday morning I found a pile of letters on my desk and that evening I realized afresh that teaching has its pleasures as well as its pains.  Those compositions would atone for much.  Here is Ned Clay’s, address, spelling, and grammar as originally penned.