s Sarah looked as if she felt
sorry she hadn't asked for thirty.

"Well, I guess you may have it. I want all the money I can scare up just
now. The fact is--" Miss Sarah threw up her head importantly, with a
proud flush on her thin cheeks--"I'm going to be married--to Luther
Wallace. He wanted me twenty years ago. I liked him real well but he was
poor then and father packed him off. I s'pose I shouldn't have let him
go so meek but I was timid and frightened of father. Besides, I didn't
know men were so skurse."

When the girls were safely away, Diana driving and Anne holding
the coveted platter carefully on her lap, the green, rain-freshened
solitudes of the Tory Road were enlivened by ripples of girlish
laughter.

"I'll amuse your Aunt Josephine with the 'strange eventful history' of
this afternoon when I go to town tomorrow. We've had a rather trying
time but it's over now. I've got the platter, and that rain has laid the
dust beautifully. So 'all's well that ends well.'"

"We're not home yet," said Diana rather pessimistically, "and there's
no telling what may happen before we are. You're such a girl to have
adventures, Anne."

"Having adventures comes natural to some people," said Anne serenely.
"You just have a gift for them or you haven't."

XIX

Just a Happy Day

"After all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and
sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful
or exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures,
following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string."

Life at Green Gables was full of just such days, for Anne's adventures
and misadventures, like those of other people, did not all happen at
once, but were sprinkled over the year, with long stretches of harmless,
happy days between, filled with work and dreams and laughter and
lessons. Such a day came late in August. In the forenoon Anne and Diana
rowed the delighted twins down the pond to the sandshore to pick "sweet
grass" and paddle in the surf, over which the wind was harping an old
lyric learned when the world was young.

In the afternoon Anne walked down to the old Irving place to see Paul.
She found him stretched out on the grassy bank beside the thick fir
grove that sheltered the house on the north, absorbed in a book of fairy
tales. He sprang up radiantly at sight of her.

"Oh, I'm so glad you've come, teacher," he said eagerly, "because
Grandma's