“I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my birthday on Saturday,” said Anne.

“Your birthday?  But your birthday was in March!”

“That wasn’t my fault,” laughed Anne.  “If my parents had consulted me it would never have happened then.  I should have chosen to be born in spring, of course.  It must be delightful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets.  You would always feel that you were their foster sister.  But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring.  Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane will be home.  We’ll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden day making the acquaintance of the spring.  We none of us really know her yet, but we’ll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else.  I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow.  I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been seen although they may have been looked at.  We’ll make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our hearts.”

“It sounds awfully nice,” said Diana, with some inward distrust of Anne’s magic of words.  “But won’t it be very damp in some places yet?”

“Oh, we’ll wear rubbers,” was Anne’s concession to practicalities.  “And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare lunch.  I’m going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake.  And we must have sandwiches too, though they’re not very poetical.”

Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and blue, warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow and orchard.  Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green.

Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls, basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and fir.  Their blithe voices and laughter echoed down to him.

“It’s so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn’t it?” Anne was saying, with true Anneish philosophy.  “Let’s try to make this a really golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight.  We’re to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else.  ’Begone, dull care!’ Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school yesterday.”

“How do you know?” gasped Jane, amazed.

“Oh, I know the expression . . .  I’ve felt it often enough on my own face.  But put it out of your mind, there’s a dear.  It will keep till Monday . . . or if it doesn’t so much the better.  Oh, girls, girls, see that patch of violets!  There’s something for memory’s picture gallery.  When I’m eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . .  I shall shut my eyes and see those violets just as I see them now.  That’s the first good gift our day has given us.”