“I suppose you wonder what I’m doing at Prospect Point.  Well, I always like to spend a month of summer at the shore, and father insists that I come to his second-cousin Emily’s ‘select boardinghouse’ at Prospect Point.  So a fortnight ago I came as usual.  And as usual old ’Uncle Mark Miller’ brought me from the station with his ancient buggy and what he calls his ‘generous purpose’ horse.  He is a nice old man and gave me a handful of pink peppermints.  Peppermints always seem to me such a religious sort of candy—­I suppose because when I was a little girl Grandmother Gordon always gave them to me in church.  Once I asked, referring to the smell of peppermints, ‘Is that the odor of sanctity?’ I didn’t like to eat Uncle Mark’s peppermints because he just fished them loose out of his pocket, and had to pick some rusty nails and other things from among them before he gave them to me.  But I wouldn’t hurt his dear old feelings for anything, so I carefully sowed them along the road at intervals.  When the last one was gone, Uncle Mark said, a little rebukingly, ’Ye shouldn’t a’et all them candies to onct, Miss Phil.  You’ll likely have the stummick-ache.’

“Cousin Emily has only five boarders besides myself—­four old ladies and one young man.  My right-hand neighbor is Mrs. Lilly.  She is one of those people who seem to take a gruesome pleasure in detailing all their many aches and pains and sicknesses.  You cannot mention any ailment but she says, shaking her head, ’Ah, I know too well what that is’—­and then you get all the details.  Jonas declares he once spoke of locomotor ataxia in hearing and she said she knew too well what that was.  She suffered from it for ten years and was finally cured by a traveling doctor.

“Who is Jonas?  Just wait, Anne Shirley.  You’ll hear all about Jonas in the proper time and place.  He is not to be mixed up with estimable old ladies.

“My left-hand neighbor at the table is Mrs. Phinney.  She always speaks with a wailing, dolorous voice—­you are nervously expecting her to burst into tears every moment.  She gives you the impression that life to her is indeed a vale of tears, and that a smile, never to speak of a laugh, is a frivolity truly reprehensible.  She has a worse opinion of me than Aunt Jamesina, and she doesn’t love me hard to atone for it, as Aunty J. does, either.

“Miss Maria Grimsby sits cati-corner from me.  The first day I came I remarked to Miss Maria that it looked a little like rain—­and Miss Maria laughed.  I said the road from the station was very pretty—­and Miss Maria laughed.  I said there seemed to be a few mosquitoes left yet—­and Miss Maria laughed.  I said that Prospect Point was as beautiful as ever—­and Miss Maria laughed.  If I were to say to Miss Maria, ’My father has hanged himself, my mother has taken poison, my brother is in the penitentiary, and I am in the last stages of consumption,’ Miss Maria would laugh.  She can’t help it—­she was born so; but is very sad and awful.