rich and
beautiful and clever."

"I'd wish to be tall and slender," said Diana.

"I would wish to be famous," said Priscilla. Anne thought of her hair
and then dismissed the thought as unworthy.

"I'd wish it might be spring all the time and in everybody's heart and
all our lives," she said.

"But that," said Priscilla, "would be just wishing this world were like
heaven."

"Only like a part of heaven. In the other parts there would be summer
and autumn . . . yes, and a bit of winter, too. I think I want glittering
snowy fields and white frosts in heaven sometimes. Don't you, Jane?"

"I . . . I don't know," said Jane uncomfortably. Jane was a good girl,
a member of the church, who tried conscientiously to live up to her
profession and believed everything she had been taught. But she never
thought about heaven any more than she could help, for all that.

"Minnie May asked me the other day if we would wear our best dresses
every day in heaven," laughed Diana.

"And didn't you tell her we would?" asked Anne.

"Mercy, no! I told her we wouldn't be thinking of dresses at all there."

"Oh, I think we will . . . a LITTLE," said Anne earnestly. "There'll be
plenty of time in all eternity for it without neglecting more important
things. I believe we'll all wear beautiful dresses . . . or I suppose
RAIMENT would be a more suitable way of speaking. I shall want to wear
pink for a few centuries at first . . . it would take me that long to get
tired of it, I feel sure. I do love pink so and I can never wear it in
THIS world."

Past the spruces the lane dipped down into a sunny little open where
a log bridge spanned a brook; and then came the glory of a sunlit
beechwood where the air was like transparent golden wine, and the leaves
fresh and green, and the wood floor a mosaic of tremulous sunshine. Then
more wild cherries, and a little valley of lissome firs, and then a hill
so steep that the girls lost their breath climbing it; but when they
reached the top and came out into the open the prettiest surprise of all
awaited them.

Beyond were the "back fields" of the farms that ran out to the upper
Carmody road. Just before them, hemmed in by beeches and firs but open
to the south, was a little corner and in it a garden . . . or what had
once been a garden. A tumbledown stone dyke, overgrown with mosses and
grass, surrounded it. Along the eastern side ran a row of garden cherry
trees, white as a snowdrift. There were tra