ix, you know. I never heard any reason for his staying a
bachelor, but there must be one, believe ME. He sailed all his life
till five years ago, and there's no corner of the earth he hasn't poked
his nose into. He and Elizabeth Russell were great cronies, all their
lives, but they never had any notion of sweet-hearting. Elizabeth
never married, though she had plenty of chances. She was a great
beauty when she was young. The year the Prince of Wales came to the
Island she was visiting her uncle in Charlottetown and he was a
Government official, and so she got invited to the great ball. She was
the prettiest girl there, and the Prince danced with her, and all the
other women he didn't dance with were furious about it, because their
social standing was higher than hers and they said he shouldn't have
passed them over. Elizabeth was always very proud of that dance. Mean
folks said that was why she never married--she couldn't put up with an
ordinary man after dancing with a prince. But that wasn't so. She
told me the reason once--it was because she had such a temper that she
was afraid she couldn't live peaceably with any man. She HAD an awful
temper--she used to have to go upstairs and bite pieces out of her
bureau to keep it down by times. But I told her that wasn't any reason
for not marrying if she wanted to. There's no reason why we should let
the men have a monopoly of temper, is there, Mrs. Blythe, dearie?"

"I've a bit of temper myself," sighed Anne.

"It's well you have, dearie. You won't be half so likely to be trodden
on, believe ME! My, how that golden glow of yours is blooming! Your
garden looks fine. Poor Elizabeth always took such care of it."

"I love it," said Anne. "I'm glad it's so full of old-fashioned
flowers. Speaking of gardening, we want to get a man to dig up that
little lot beyond the fir grove and set it out with strawberry plants
for us. Gilbert is so busy he will never get time for it this fall.
Do you know anyone we can get?"

"Well, Henry Hammond up at the Glen goes out doing jobs like that.
He'll do, maybe. He's always a heap more interested in his wages than
in his work, just like a man, and he's so slow in the uptake that he
stands still for five minutes before it dawns on him that he's stopped.
His father threw a stump at him when he was small.

"Nice gentle missile, wasn't it? So like a man! Course, the boy never
got over it. But he's the only one I can recomm