ANNE OF AVONLEA ***
Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer and David Widger
ANNE OF AVONLEA
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
To
my former teacher HATTIE GORDON SMITH in grateful remembrance of her sympathy and encouragement.
Flowers spring to blossom where she walks The careful ways of duty, Our hard, stiff lines of life with her Are flowing curves of beauty. --WHITTIER
I An Irate Neighbor II Selling in Haste and Repenting at Leisure III Mr. Harrison at Home IV Different Opinions47 V A Full-fledged Schoolma'am VI All Sorts and Conditions of Men . . . and women VII The Pointing of Duty VIII Marilla Adopts Twins IX A Question of Color X Davy in Search of a Sensation XI Facts and Fancies XII A Jonah Day XIII A Golden Picnic XIV A Danger Averted XV The Beginning of Vacation XVI The Substance of Things Hoped For XVII A Chapter of Accidents XVIII An Adventure on the Tory Road XIX Just a Happy Day XX The Way It Often Happens XXI Sweet Miss Lavendar XXII Odds and Ends XXIII Miss Lavendar's Romance XXIV A Prophet in His Own Country XXV An Avonlea Scandal XXVI Around the Bend XXVII An Afternoon at the Stone House XXVIII The Prince Comes Back to the Enchanted Palace XXIX Poetry and Prose XXX A Wedding at the Stone House
I
An Irate Neighbor
A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing slendor of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a corner of the cherry orchard, was fitter for dreams than dead languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheeded to the ground, and Anne, her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr. J. A. Harrison's house like a great white mountain, was far away in a delicious world where a certain schoolteacher was doing a wonderful work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions.
To be sure, if you came down to harsh facts . . . which, it must be confessed, Anne seldom did until she had to . . . it did not seem likely that there was much promising material for celebrities in Avonlea school; but you could never tell what might happen if a teacher used her influence for good. Anne had certain rose-tinted ideals of what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about it; and she was in the midst of a delightful scene, forty years hence, with a famous personage . . . just exactly what he was to be famous for was left in convenient haziness, but Anne thought it would be rather nice to have him a college president or a Canadian premier . . . bowing low over her wrinkled hand and assuring her that it was she who had first kindled his ambition, and that all his success in life was due to the lessons she had instilled so long ago in Avonlea school. This pleasant vision was shattered by a most unpleasant interruption.
A demure little Jersey cow came scuttling down the lane and five seconds later Mr. Harrison arrived . . . if "arrived" be not too mild a term to describe the manner of his irruption into the yard.
He bounced over the fence without waiting to open the gate, and angrily confronted astonished Anne, who had risen to her feet and stood looking at him in some bewilderment. Mr. Harrison was their new righthand neighbor and she had never met him before, although she had seen him once or twice.
In early April, before Anne had come home from Queen's, Mr. Robert Bell, whose farm adjoined the Cuthbert place on the west, had sold out and moved to Charlottetown. His farm had been bought by a certain Mr. J. A. Harrison, whose name, and the fact that he was a New Brunswick man, were all that was known about him. But before he had been a month in Avonlea he had won the reputation of being an odd person . . . "a crank," Mrs. Rachel Lynde said. Mrs. Rachel was an outspoken lady, as those of you who may have already made her acquaintance will remember. Mr. Harrison was certainly different from other people . . . and that is the essential characteristic of a crank, as everybody knows.
