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