“I’ll be better able to tell you when I find out what it is,” said Priscilla, casting aside a Greek lexicon and taking up Stella’s letter. Stella Maynard had been one of their chums at Queen’s Academy and had been teaching school ever since.
“But I’m going to give it up, Anne dear,” she wrote, “and go to college next year. As I took the third year at Queen’s I can enter the Sophomore year. I’m tired of teaching in a back country school. Some day I’m going to write a treatise on ‘The Trials of a Country Schoolmarm.’ It will be a harrowing bit of realism. It seems to be the prevailing impression that we live in clover, and have nothing to do but draw our quarter’s salary. My treatise shall tell the truth about us. Why, if a week should pass without some one telling me that I am doing easy work for big pay I would conclude that I might as well order my ascension robe ‘immediately and to onct.’ ‘Well, you get your money easy,’ some ratepayer will tell me, condescendingly. ‘All you have to do is to sit there and hear lessons.’ I used to argue the matter at first, but I’m wiser now. Facts are stubborn things, but as some one has wisely said, not half so stubborn as fallacies. So I only smile loftily now in eloquent silence. Why, I have nine grades in my school and I have to teach a little of everything, from investigating the interiors of earthworms to the study of the solar system. My youngest pupil is four — his mother sends him to school to ‘get him out of the way’ — and my oldest twenty — it ‘suddenly struck him’ that it would be easier to go to school and get an education than follow the plough any longer. In the wild effort to cram all sorts of research into six hours a day I don’t wonder if the children feel like the little boy who was taken to see the biograph. ‘I have to look for what’s coming next before I know what went last,’ he complained. I feel like that myself.
“And the letters I get, Anne! Tommy’s mother writes me that Tommy is not coming on in arithmetic as fast as she would like. He is only in simple reduction yet, and Johnny Johnson is in fractions, and Johnny isn’t half as smart as her Tommy, and she can’t understand it. And Susy’s father wants to know why Susy can’t write a letter without misspelling half the words, and Dick’s aunt wants me to change his seat, because that bad Brown boy he is sitting with is teaching him to say naughty words.
“As to the financial part — but I’ll not begin on that. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make country schoolmarms!
“There, I feel better, after that growl. After all, I’ve enjoyed these past two years. But I’m coming to Redmond.
“And now, Anne, I’ve a little plan. You know how I loathe boarding. I’ve boarded for four years and I’m so tired of it. I don’t feel like enduring three years more of it.
“Now, why can’t you and Priscilla and I club together, rent a little house somewhere in Kingsport, and board ourselves? It would be cheaper than any other way. Of course, we would have to have a housekeeper and I have one ready on the spot. You’ve heard me speak of Aunt Jamesina? She’s the sweetest aunt that ever lived, in spite of her name. She can’t help that! She was called Jamesina because her father, whose name was James, was drowned at sea a month before she was born. I always call her Aunt Jimsie. Well, her only daughter has recently married and gone to the foreign mission field. Aunt Jamesina is left alone in a great big house, and she is horribly lonesome. She will come to Kingsport and keep house for us if we want her, and I know you’ll both love her. The more I think of the plan the more I like it. We could have such good, independent times.
“Now, if you and Priscilla agree to it, wouldn’t it be a good idea for you, who are on the spot, to look around and see if you can find a suitable house this spring? That would be better than leaving it till the fall. If you could get a furnished one so much the better, but if not, we can scare up a few sticks of finiture between us and old family friends with attics. Anyhow, decide as soon as you can and write me, so that Aunt Jamesina will know what plans to make for next year.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” said Priscilla.
“So do I,” agreed Anne delightedly. “Of course, we have a nice boardinghouse here, but, when all’s said and done, a boardinghouse isn’t home. So let’s go house-hunting at once, before exams come on.”
“I’m afraid it will be hard enough to get a really suitable house,” warned Priscilla. “Don’t expect too much, Anne. Nice houses in nice localities will probably be away beyond our means. We’ll likely have to content ourselves with a shabby little place on some street whereon live people whom to know is to be unknown, and make life inside compensate for the outside.”
Accordingly they went house-hunting, but to find just what they wanted proved even harder than Priscilla had feared. Houses there were galore, furnished and unfurnished; but one was too big, another too small; this one too expensive, that one too far from Redmond. Exams were on and over; the last week of the term came and still their “house o’dreams,” as Anne called it, remained a castle in the air.
“We shall have to give up and wait till the fall, I suppose,” said Priscilla wearily, as they rambled through the park on one of April’s darling days of breeze and blue, when the harbor was creaming and shimmering beneath the pearl-hued mists floating over it. “We may find some shack to shelter us then; and if not, boardinghouses we shall have always with us.”
“I’m not going to worry about it just now, anyway, and spoil this lovely afternoon,” said Anne, gazing around her with delight. The fresh chill air was faintly charged with the aroma of pine balsam, and the sky above was crystal clear and blue — a great inverted cup of blessing. “Spring is singing in my blood today, and the lure of April is abroad on the air. I’m seeing visions and dreaming dreams, Pris. That’s because the wind is from the west. I do love the west wind. It sings of hope and gladness, doesn’t it? When the east wind blows I always think of sorrowful rain on the eaves and sad waves on a gray shore. When I get old I shall have rheumatism when the wind is east.”
“And isn’t it jolly when you discard furs and winter garments for the first time and sally forth, like this, in spring attire?” laughed Priscilla. “Don’t you feel as if you had been made over new?”
“Everything is new in the spring,” said Anne. “Springs themselves are always so new, too. No spring is ever just like any other spring. It always has something of its own to be its own peculiar sweetness. See how green the grass is around that little pond, and how the willow buds are bursting.”
“And exams are over and gone — the time of Convocation will come soon — next Wednesday. This day next week we’ll be home.”
“I’m glad,” said Anne dreamily. “There are so many things I want to do. I want to sit on the back porch steps and feel the breeze blowing down over Mr. Harrison’s fields. I want to hunt ferns in the Haunted Wood and gather violets in Violet Vale. Do you remember the day of our golden picnic, Priscilla? I want to hear the frogs singing and the poplars whispering. But I’ve learned to love Kingsport, too, and I’m glad I’m coming back next fall. If I hadn’t won the Thorburn I don’t believe I could have. I COULDN’T take any of Marilla’s little hoard.”
“If we could only find a house!” sighed Priscilla. “Look over there at Kingsport, Anne — houses, houses everywhere, and not one for us.”
“Stop it, Pris. ‘The best is yet to be.’ Like the old Roman, we’ll find a house or build one. On a day like this there’s no such word as fail in my bright lexicon.”
They lingered in the park until sunset, living in the amazing miracle and glory and wonder of the springtide; and they went home as usual, by way of Spofford Avenue, that they might have the delight of looking at Patty’s Place.
“I feel as if something mysterious were going to happen right away—’by the pricking of my thumbs,’” said Anne, as they went up the slope. “It’s