mercifully.

XIII

A Golden Picnic

Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables,
just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the Haunted
Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad's Bubble, where tiny
ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from
a nap.

"I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my
birthday on Saturday," said Anne.

"Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!"

"That wasn't my fault," laughed Anne. "If my parents had consulted me
it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be born in
spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the world with the
mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their foster
sister. But since I didn't, the next best thing is to celebrate my
birthday in the spring. Priscilla is coming over Saturday and Jane will
be home. We'll all four start off to the woods and spend a golden day
making the acquaintance of the spring. We none of us really know her
yet, but we'll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else. I
want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow. I have a
conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have
never really been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at. We'll
make friends with wind and sky and sun, and bring home the spring in our
hearts."

"It SOUNDS awfully nice," said Diana, with some inward distrust of
Anne's magic of words. "But won't it be very damp in some places yet?"

"Oh, we'll wear rubbers," was Anne's concession to practicalities.
"And I want you to come over early Saturday morning and help me prepare
lunch. I'm going to have the daintiest things possible . . . things that
will match the spring, you understand . . . little jelly tarts and lady
fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and
buttercup cake. And we must have sandwiches too, though they're NOT very
poetical."

Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnic . . . a day of breeze and blue,
warm, sunny, with a little rollicking wind blowing across meadow
and orchard. Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate,
flower-starred green.

Mr. Harrison, harrowing at the back of his farm and feeling some of the
spring witch-work even in his sober, middle-aged blood, saw four girls,
basket laden, tripping across the end of his field where it joined a
fringing woodland of birch a