instead of two hopelessly segregated existences.  The first batch contained six letters, from Jane Andrews, Ruby Gillis, Diana Barry, Marilla, Mrs. Lynde and Davy.  Jane’s was a copperplate production, with every “t” nicely crossed and every “i” precisely dotted, and not an interesting sentence in it.  She never mentioned the school, concerning which Anne was avid to hear; she never answered one of the questions Anne had asked in her letter.  But she told Anne how many yards of lace she had recently crocheted, and the kind of weather they were having in Avonlea, and how she intended to have her new dress made, and the way she felt when her head ached.  Ruby Gillis wrote a gushing epistle deploring Anne’s absence, assuring her she was horribly missed in everything, asking what the Redmond “fellows” were like, and filling the rest with accounts of her own harrowing experiences with her numerous admirers.  It was a silly, harmless letter, and Anne would have laughed over it had it not been for the postscript.  “Gilbert seems to be enjoying Redmond, judging from his letters,” wrote Ruby.  “I don’t think Charlie is so stuck on it.”

So Gilbert was writing to Ruby!  Very well.  He had a perfect right to, of course.  Only—!!  Anne did not know that Ruby had written the first letter and that Gilbert had answered it from mere courtesy.  She tossed Ruby’s letter aside contemptuously.  But it took all Diana’s breezy, newsy, delightful epistle to banish the sting of Ruby’s postscript.  Diana’s letter contained a little too much Fred, but was otherwise crowded and crossed with items of interest, and Anne almost felt herself back in Avonlea while reading it.  Marilla’s was a rather prim and colorless epistle, severely innocent of gossip or emotion.  Yet somehow it conveyed to Anne a whiff of the wholesome, simple life at Green Gables, with its savor of ancient peace, and the steadfast abiding love that was there for her.  Mrs. Lynde’s letter was full of church news.  Having broken up housekeeping, Mrs. Lynde had more time than ever to devote to church affairs and had flung herself into them heart and soul.  She was at present much worked up over the poor “supplies” they were having in the vacant Avonlea pulpit.

“I don’t believe any but fools enter the ministry nowadays,” she wrote bitterly.  “Such candidates as they have sent us, and such stuff as they preach!  Half of it ain’t true, and, what’s worse, it ain’t sound doctrine.  The one we have now is the worst of the lot.  He mostly takes a text and preaches about something else.  And he says he doesn’t believe all the heathen will be eternally lost.  The idea!  If they won’t all the money we’ve been giving to Foreign Missions will be clean wasted, that’s what!  Last Sunday night he announced that next Sunday he’d preach on the axe-head that swam.  I think he’d better confine himself to the Bible and leave sensational subjects alone.  Things have come to a pretty pass if a minister can’t