nd fir. Their blithe voices and laughter
echoed down to him.

"It's so easy to be happy on a day like this, isn't it?" Anne was
saying, with true Anneish philosophy. "Let's try to make this a really
golden day, girls, a day to which we can always look back with delight.
We're to seek for beauty and refuse to see anything else. 'Begone, dull
care!' Jane, you are thinking of something that went wrong in school
yesterday."

"How do you know?" gasped Jane, amazed.

"Oh, I know the expression . . . I've felt it often enough on my own face.
But put it out of your mind, there's a dear. It will keep till Monday
. . . or if it doesn't so much the better. Oh, girls, girls, see that patch
of violets! There's something for memory's picture gallery. When I'm
eighty years old . . . if I ever am . . . I shall shut my eyes and see
those violets just as I see them now. That's the first good gift our day
has given us."

"If a kiss could be seen I think it would look like a violet," said
Priscilla.

Anne glowed.

"I'm so glad you SPOKE that thought, Priscilla, instead of just
thinking it and keeping it to yourself. This world would be a much more
interesting place . . . although it IS very interesting anyhow . . . if
people spoke out their real thoughts."

"It would be too hot to hold some folks," quoted Jane sagely.

"I suppose it might be, but that would be their own faults for thinking
nasty things. Anyhow, we can tell all our thoughts today because we are
going to have nothing but beautiful thoughts. Everybody can say just
what comes into her head. THAT is conversation. Here's a little path I
never saw before. Let's explore it."

The path was a winding one, so narrow that the girls walked in single
file and even then the fir boughs brushed their faces. Under the firs
were velvety cushions of moss, and further on, where the trees were
smaller and fewer, the ground was rich in a variety of green growing
things.

"What a lot of elephant's ears," exclaimed Diana. "I'm going to pick a
big bunch, they're so pretty."

"How did such graceful feathery things ever come to have such a dreadful
name?" asked Priscilla.

"Because the person who first named them either had no imagination at
all or else far too much," said Anne, "Oh, girls, look at that!"

"That" was a shallow woodland pool in the center of a little open glade
where the path ended. Later on in the season it would be dried up
and its place filled with a rank growth