Pushing through the undergrowth beyond, the girls came out to the young green seclusion of Mr. Silas Sloane’s back pasture.  Across it they found the entrance to a lane striking up through the woods and voted to explore it also.  It rewarded their quest with a succession of pretty surprises.  First, skirting Mr. Sloane’s pasture, came an archway of wild cherry trees all in bloom.  The girls swung their hats on their arms and wreathed their hair with the creamy, fluffy blossoms.  Then the lane turned at right angles and plunged into a spruce wood so thick and dark that they walked in a gloom as of twilight, with not a glimpse of sky or sunlight to be seen.

“This is where the bad wood elves dwell,” whispered Anne.  “They are impish and malicious but they can’t harm us, because they are not allowed to do evil in the spring.  There was one peeping at us around that old twisted fir; and didn’t you see a group of them on that big freckly toadstool we just passed?  The good fairies always dwell in the sunshiny places.”

“I wish there really were fairies,” said Jane.  “Wouldn’t it be nice to have three wishes granted you . . . or even only one?  What would you wish for, girls, if you could have a wish granted?  I’d wish to be rich and beautiful and clever.”

“I’d wish to be tall and slender,” said Diana.

“I would wish to be famous,” said Priscilla.  Anne thought of her hair and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.

“I’d wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody’s heart and all our lives,” she said.

“But that,” said Priscilla, “would be just wishing this world were like heaven.”

“Only like a part of heaven.  In the other parts there would be summer and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too.  I think I want glittering snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes.  Don’t you, Jane?”

“I . . .  I don’t know,” said Jane uncomfortably.  Jane was a good girl, a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her profession and believed everything she had been taught.  But she never thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.

“Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses every day in heaven,” laughed Diana.

“And didn’t you tell her we would?” asked Anne.

“Mercy, no!  I told her we wouldn’t be thinking of dresses at all there.”

“Oh, I think we will . . . a little,” said Anne earnestly.  “There’ll be plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more important things.  I believe we’ll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I suppose raiment would be a more suitable way of speaking.  I shall want to wear pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me that long to get tired of it, I feel sure.  I do love pink so and I can never wear it in this world.”