Anne of Avonlea: Chapters 1–5

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.

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.

...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.

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.

John Henry mournfully averred that he would have starved to death if it wasn’t that he got home on Sundays and got a good filling up, and that his mother always gave him a basket of “grub” to take back with him on Monday mornings.

And when Mrs. Lynde went to ask for a contribution to missions...and incidentally to see the inside of the house...he told her there were more heathens among the old woman gossips in Avonlea than anywhere else he knew of, and he’d cheerfully contribute to a mission for Christianizing them if she’d undertake it.

“Why, she scrubbed the kitchen floor every second day,” Mrs. Lynde told Marilla Cuthbert indignantly, “and if you could see it now! I had to hold up my skirts as I walked across it.”

In his most amiable mood Mr. Harrison could not have been considered a handsome man; he was short and fat and bald; and now, with his round face purple with rage and his prominent blue eyes almost sticking out of his head, Anne thought he was really the ugliest person she had ever seen.

“The jail fence couldn’t keep a demon of a cow like that out. And I can tell you, you redheaded snippet, that if the cow is yours, as you say, you’d be better employed in watching her out of other people’s grain than in sitting round reading yellow-covered novels,” ...with a scathing glance at the innocent tan-colored Virgil by Anne’s feet.

Davy had been out making mud pies and Dora went out to call him in. Davy pushed her headfirst into the biggest pie and then, because she cried, he got into it himself and wallowed in it to show her it was nothing to cry about.

Anne and Marilla furtively exchanged amused smiles.

“I think he is a very disagreeable man,” said Anne, with a resentful toss of her ruddy head.

Before them on the right extended Mr. Harrison’s broad, gray-green field of late oats, wet and luxuriant; and there, standing squarely in the middle of it, up to her sleek sides in the lush growth, and blinking at them calmly over the intervening tassels, was a Jersey cow!

I suppose it’s just as well she’s gone, though you DO do things in a dreadful headlong fashion, Anne.

On the table reposed a nut cake which she had baked that morning...a particularly toothsome concoction iced with pink icing and adorned with walnuts.

“That is, if he gives me a chance to say anything at all,” she thought ruefully, as she climbed the lane fence and started on a short cut across the fields, golden in the light of the dreamy August evening.

He had laid aside his pipe and donned his coat; he offered Anne a very dusty chair very politely, and her reception would have passed off pleasantly enough if it had not been for the telltale of a parrot who was peering through the bars of his cage with wicked golden eyes.

“I’ve come to confess something to you, Mr. Harrison,” she said resolutely.

Anne leaned forward, clasping her hands with her old childish gesture, while her big gray eyes gazed imploringly into Mr. Harrison’s embarrassed face...

“And I suppose you were scared to death to come here and tell me, after the fuss I made yesterday, hey? But you mustn’t mind me, I’m a terrible outspoken old fellow, that’s all...awful apt to tell the truth, no matter if it is a bit plain.”

But Ginger’s feelings had been grievously hurt and he rejected all overtures of friendship.

“Why do you call him Ginger?” asked Anne, who liked appropriate names and thought Ginger accorded not at all with such gorgeous plumage.

Mr. Harrison flung the last sentence at Anne as explosively as if he suspected her of some latent design of persuading him to give Ginger up.

To herself, or to her particular cronies, she might admit that there were some small imperfections, easily removable, in Avonlea and its inhabitants. But to hear a practical outsider like Mr. Harrison saying it was an entirely different thing.

When she had gone Mr. Harrison watched her from the window...a lithe, girlish shape, tripping lightheartedly across the fields in the sunset afterglow.

“You ornery bird,” he muttered, “I almost wish I’d wrung your neck when my brother the sailor brought you home. Will you never be done getting me into trouble?”

Anne ran home blithely and recounted her adventures to Marilla, who had been not a little alarmed by her long absence and was on the point of starting out to look for her.

Jane had been up to spend the afternoon with Anne, who walked part of the way home with her; at the fence they met Gilbert, and all three were now talking about the fateful morrow; for that morrow was the first of September and the schools would open.

“Well, I’m going to try my way first,” said Anne, who had a fairly strong will of her own and was apt to cling very tenaciously to her theories.

It was a very good speech and had some very fine ideas in it, especially about mutual help and earnest striving after knowledge.

Anne instantly made up her mind that she would win that boy’s affection and discomfit the Pyes utterly.

Three pallid little girls crowded into one seat were certainly Cottons; and there was no doubt that the small beauty with the long brown curls and hazel eyes, who was casting coquettish looks at Jack Gills over the edge of her Testament, was Prillie Rogerson, whose father had recently married a second wife and brought Prillie home from her grandmother’s in Grafton.

Three pallid little girls crowded into one seat were certainly Cottons; and there was no doubt that the small beauty with the long brown curls and hazel eyes, who was casting coquettish looks at Jack Gills over the edge of her Testament, was Prillie Rogerson, whose father had recently married a second wife and brought Prillie home from her grandmother’s in Grafton.

Anne kept Anthony in at recess and talked to him about what was expected of gentlemen, admonishing him that they never poured water down ladies’ necks.

A veil of pink chiffon, lavishly sprinkled with huge black dots, hung like a flounce from the hat brim to her shoulders and floated off in two airy streamers behind her.

That boy has such plebeian tastes, Miss Shirley. When he was born I wanted to call him St. Clair...it sounds SO aristocratic, doesn’t it?

Did you ever hear of such ingratitude? The moment the invitation to the wedding...for he had the impertinence to send us an invitation, Miss Shirley...came to the house I said, ‘No more Jacobs for me, thank you.’

His father obstinately continues to call him Jacob, and the boy himself has a perfectly unaccountable preference for the vulgar name.

That good lady had waylaid the schoolchildren at her gate and demanded of them how they liked their new teacher.

He said you ‘weren’t any good, just like all girl teachers.’ There’s the Pye leaven for you.