Sloane not coming the first day, she was
temporarily assigned to Mirabel Cotton, who was ten years old and
therefore, in Dora's eyes, one of the "big girls."

"I think school is great fun," Davy told Marilla when he got home that
night. "You said I'd find it hard to sit still and I did . . . you mostly
do tell the truth, I notice . . . but you can wriggle your legs about
under the desk and that helps a lot. It's splendid to have so many boys
to play with. I sit with Milty Boulter and he's fine. He's longer than
me but I'm wider. It's nicer to sit in the back seats but you can't sit
there till your legs grow long enough to touch the floor. Milty drawed a
picture of Anne on his slate and it was awful ugly and I told him if he
made pictures of Anne like that I'd lick him at recess. I thought first
I'd draw one of him and put horns and a tail on it, but I was afraid it
would hurt his feelings, and Anne says you should never hurt anyone's
feelings. It seems it's dreadful to have your feelings hurt. It's better
to knock a boy down than hurt his feelings if you MUST do something.
Milty said he wasn't scared of me but he'd just as soon call it somebody
else to 'blige me, so he rubbed out Anne's name and printed Barbara
Shaw's under it. Milty doesn't like Barbara 'cause she calls him a sweet
little boy and once she patted him on his head."

Dora said primly that she liked school; but she was very quiet, even
for her; and when at twilight Marilla bade her go upstairs to bed she
hesitated and began to cry.

"I'm . . . I'm frightened," she sobbed. "I . . . I don't want to go
upstairs alone in the dark."

"What notion have you got into your head now?" demanded Marilla. "I'm
sure you've gone to bed alone all summer and never been frightened
before."

Dora still continued to cry, so Anne picked her up, cuddled her
sympathetically, and whispered,

"Tell Anne all about it, sweetheart. What are you frightened of?"

"Of . . . of Mirabel Cotton's uncle," sobbed Dora. "Mirabel Cotton told me
all about her family today in school. Nearly everybody in her family has
died . . . all her grandfathers and grandmothers and ever so many uncles
and aunts. They have a habit of dying, Mirabel says. Mirabel's awful
proud of having so many dead relations, and she told me what they all
died of, and what they said, and how they looked in their coffins. And
Mirabel says one of her uncles was seen walking around the house after
he was buried. Her m