Simon Fletcher."
"Heaven in. . .Simon Fletcher's
garret!" gasped Anne, too amazed
even to laugh. "Davy Keith,
whatever put such an extraordinary
idea into your head?"
"Milty Boulter says that's where it is. It was last Sunday in
Sunday School. The lesson was about Elijah and Elisha, and I up
and asked Miss Rogerson where heaven was. Miss Rogerson looked
awful offended. She was cross anyhow, because when she'd asked us
what Elijah left Elisha when he went to heaven Milty Boulter said,
`His old clo'es,' and us fellows all laughed before we thought. I
wish you could think first and do things afterwards, 'cause then
you wouldn't do them. But Milty didn't mean to be disrespeckful.
He just couldn't think of the name of the thing. Miss Rogerson said
heaven was where God was and I wasn't to ask questions like that.
Milty nudged me and said in a
whisper, `Heaven's in Uncle Simon's
garret and I'll esplain about it on the road home.' So when
we was coming home he esplained. Milty's a great hand at
esplaining things. Even if he don't know anything about a thing
he'll make up a lot of stuff and so you get it esplained all the
same. His mother is Mrs. Simon's sister and he went with her to
the
funeral when his cousin, Jane Ellen, died. The
minister said
she'd gone to heaven, though Milty says she was lying right before
them in the
coffin. But he s'posed they carried the
coffin to the
garret afterwards. Well, when Milty and his mother went upstairs
after it was all over to get her
bonnet he asked her where heaven
was that Jane Ellen had gone to, and she
pointed right to the
ceiling and said, `Up there.' Milty knew there wasn't anything but
the
garret over the ceiling, so that's how HE found out. And he's
been awful scared to go to his Uncle Simon's ever since."
Anne took Davy on her knee and did her best to
straighten out this
theological
tangle also. She was much better fitted for the task
than Marilla, for she remembered her own
childhood and had an
instinctive understanding of the curious ideas that seven-year-olds
sometimes get about matters that are, of course, very plain and
simple to grown up people. She had just succeeded in convincing
Davy that heaven was NOT in Simon Fletcher's
garret when Marilla
came in from the garden, where she and Dora had been picking peas.
Dora was an
industrious little soul and never happier than when
"helping" in various small tasks suited to her chubby fingers. She
fed chickens, picked up chips, wiped dishes, and ran errands galore.
She was neat,
faithful and observant; she never had to be told how
to do a thing twice and never forgot any of her little duties.
Davy, on the other hand, was rather
heedless and forgetful; but
he had the born knack of
winning love, and even yet Anne and Marilla
liked him the better.
While Dora
proudly shelled the peas and Davy made boats of the pods,
with masts of matches and sails of paper, Anne told Marilla about
the wonderful
contents of her letter.
"Oh, Marilla, what do you think? I've had a letter from Priscilla
and she says that Mrs. Morgan is on the Island, and that if it is
fine Thursday they are going to drive up to Avonlea and will reach
here about twelve. They will spend the afternoon with us and go to
the hotel at White Sands in the evening, because some of Mrs. Morgan's
American friends are staying there. Oh, Marilla, isn't it wonderful?
I can hardly believe I'm not dreaming."
"I daresay Mrs. Morgan is a lot like other people," said Marilla drily,
although she did feel a
trifle excited herself. Mrs. Morgan was a
famous woman and a visit from her was no
commonplace occurrence.
"They'll be here to dinner, then?"
"Yes; and oh, Marilla, may I cook every bit of the dinner myself?
I want to feel that I can do something for the author of `The
Rosebud Garden,' if it is only to cook a dinner for her.
You won't mind, will you?"
"Goodness, I'm not so fond of stewing over a hot fire in July that
it would vex me very much to have someone else do it. You're quite
welcome to the job."
"Oh, thank you," said Anne, as if Marilla had just conferred a
tremendous favor, "I'll make out the menu this very night."
"You'd better not try to put on too much style," warned Marilla,
a little alarmed by the high-flown sound of "menu." You'll likely
come to grief if you do."
"Oh, I'm not going to put on any `style,' if you mean
trying to do or
have things we don't usually have on festal occasions,"
assured Anne.
"That would be affectation, and, although I know I haven't as much
sense and steadiness as a girl of seventeen and a schoolteacher
ought to have, I'm not so silly AS that. But I want to have
everything as nice and
dainty as possible. Davy-boy, don't leave
those peapods on the back stairs. . .someone might slip on them.
I'll have a light soup to begin with. . .you know I can make
lovely cream-of-onion soup. . .and then a couple of roast fowls.
I'll have the two white roosters. I have real
affection for
those roosters and they've been pets ever since the gray hen
hatched out just the two of them. . .little balls of yellow down.
But I know they would have to be sacrificed
sometime, and surely
there couldn't be a worthier occasion than this. But oh, Marilla,
_I_ cannot kill them. . .not even for Mrs. Morgan's sake. I'll have
to ask John Henry Carter to come over and do it for me."
"I'll do it," volunteered Davy, "if Marilla'll hold them by the legs"
cause I guess it'd take both my hands to manage the axe. It's awful
jolly fun to see them hopping about after their heads are cut off."
"Then I'll have peas and beans and creamed potatoes and a
lettuce salad, for vegetables," resumed Anne, "and for dessert,
lemon pie with whipped cream, and coffee and
cheese and lady fingers.
I'll make the pies and lady fingers tomorrow and do up my white
muslindress. And I must tell Diana tonight, for she'll want to do up hers.
Mrs. Morgan's heroines are nearly always dressed in white
muslin,
and Diana and I have always
resolved that that was what we
would wear if we ever met her. It will be such a delicate
compliment, don't you think? Davy, dear, you mustn't poke peapods
into the cracks of the floor. I must ask Mr. and Mrs. Allan and
Miss Stacy to dinner, too, for they're all very
anxious to meet
Mrs. Morgan. It's so
fortunate she's coming while Miss Stacy is here.
Davy dear, don't sail the peapods in the water
bucket. . .go out to
the
trough. Oh, I do hope it will be fine Thursday, and I think it
will, for Uncle Abe said last night when he called at Mr. Harrison's,
that it was going to rain most of this week."
"That's a good sign," agreed Marilla.
Anne ran across to Orchard Slope that evening to tell the news to Diana,
who was also very much excited over it, and they discussed the matter
in the
hammock swung under the big
willow in the Barry garden.
"Oh, Anne, mayn't I help you cook the dinner?" implored Diana.
"You know I can make splendid
lettuce salad."
"Indeed you, may" said Anne unselfishly. "And I shall want you to
help me
decorate too. I mean to have the
parlor simply a BOWER of
blossoms. . .and the dining table is to be adorned with wild roses.
Oh, I do hope everything will go
smoothly. Mrs. Morgan's heroines
NEVER get into scrapes or are taken at a
disadvantage, and they
are always so selfpossessed and such good housekeepers. They seem
to be BORN good housekeepers. You remember that Gertrude in
`Edgewood Days' kept house for her father when she was only eight
years old. When I was eight years old I hardly knew how to do a
thing except bring up children. Mrs. Morgan must be an authority
on girls when she has written so much about them, and I do want her
to have a good opinion of us. I've imagined it all out a dozen
different ways. . .what she'll look like, and what she'll say, and
what I'll say. And I'm so
anxious about my nose. There are seven
freckles on it, as you can see. They came at the A.V.I S.
picnic,
when I went around in the sun without my hat. I suppose it's
ungrateful of me to worry over them, when I should be thankful
they're not spread all over my face as they once were; but I do
wish they hadn't come. . .all Mrs. Morgan's heroines have such
perfect complexions. I can't recall a
freckled one among them."
"Yours are not very noticeable," comforted Diana. "Try a little
lemon juice on them tonight."
The next day Anne made her pies and lady fingers, did up her
muslindress, and swept and dusted every room in the house. . .a quite
unnecessary
proceeding, for Green Gables was, as usual, in the
apple pie order dear to Marilla's heart. But Anne felt that a
fleck of dust would be a desecration in a house that was to be
honored by a visit from Charlotte E. Morgan. She even cleaned out
the "catch-all"
closet under the stairs, although there was not the
remotest
possibility of Mrs. Morgan's
seeing its interior.
"But I want to FEEL that it is in perfect order, even if she isn't
to see it," Anne told Marilla. "You know, in her book `Golden Keys,'
she makes her two heroines Alice and Louisa take for their motto
that verse of Longfellow's,
"`In the elder days of art
Builders
wrought with greatest care
Each minute and
unseen part,
For the gods see everywhere,'
and so they always kept their
cellar stairs scrubbed and never
forgot to sweep under the beds. I should have a
guilty conscience
if I thought this
closet was in
disorder when Mrs. Morgan was in
the house. Ever since we read `Golden Keys,' last April, Diana and
I have taken that verse for our motto too."
That night John Henry Carter and Davy between them contrived to execute
the two white roosters, and Anne dressed them, the usually distasteful
task glorified in her eyes by the
destination of the plump birds.
"I don't like picking fowls," she told Marilla, "but isn't it
fortunatewe don't have to put our souls into what our hands may be doing?
I've been picking chickens with my hands but in
imagination I've
been roaming the Milky Way."
"I thought you'd scattered more feathers over the floor than usual,"
remarked Marilla.
Then Anne put Davy to bed and made him promise that he would behave
perfectly the next day.
"If I'm as good as good can be all day tomorrow will you let me be
just as bad as I like all the next day?" asked Davy.
"I couldn't do that," said Anne discreetly, "but I'll take you and
Dora for a row in the flat right to the bottom of the pond, and
we'll go
ashore on the sandhills and have a
picnic."
"It's a bargain," said Davy. "I'll be good, you bet. I meant to
go over to Mr. Harrison's and fire peas from my new popgun at
Ginger but another day'll do as well. I espect it will be just
like Sunday, but a
picnic at the shore'll make up for THAT."
XVII
A Chapter of Accidents
Anne woke three times in the night and made pilgrimages to her
window to make sure that Uncle Abe's
prediction was not coming true.
Finally the morning dawned pearly and lustrous in a sky full of
silver sheen and
radiance, and the wonderful day had arrived.
Diana appeared soon after breakfast, with a basket of flowers over
one arm and HER
muslin dress over the other. . .for it would not
do to don it until all the dinner preparations were completed.
Meanwhile she wore her afternoon pink print and a lawn apron
fearfully and
wonderfully ruffled and frilled; and very neat and
pretty and rosy she was.
"You look simply sweet," said Anne admiringly.
Diana sighed.
"But I've had to let out every one of my dresses AGAIN. I weigh
four pounds more than I did in July. Anne, WHERE will this end?
Mrs. Morgan's heroines are all tall and slender."
"Well, let's forget our troubles and think of our mercies," said
Anne gaily. "Mrs. Allan says that
whenever we think of anything
that is a trial to us we should also think of something nice that
we can set over against it. If you are
slightly too plump you've
got the dearest dimples; and if I have a
freckled nose the SHAPE of
it is all right. Do you think the lemon juice did any good?"
"Yes, I really think it did," said Diana critically; and, much
elated, Anne led the way to the garden, which was full of airy
shadows and wavering golden lights.