Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Three to Five

In which Anne confesses her bovine misdeed to Mr. Harrison and the two become friends, there is some disagreement about methods of classroom discipline, and Anne has a most tiring first day of school; and in which the narrator tries to remember what he recorded nearly two months ago, itself after a two-month break.



Hey, remember Avonlea? We're going to pick up right where we left off, of course, with Anne trepidatiously heading over to Mr. Harrison's house to confess about accidentally selling his Jersey cow.

Here's this installment's cover, a lovely paper-cut design by Simon and Schuster as part of their Aladdin Classics series. I like how this incorporates various aspects of the book: the parrot Ginger, Anne's Jersey cow, the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. It sets it apart from the vast stretches of "Anne standing in a field" covers, which... okay, we'll be seeing several of them I'm sure, because the pickings are a little slimmer for this than for Green Gables. Simon and Schuster have done similar covers for a few other Anne novels, too!

A few short notes:

 8:31 - "as good a jorum of tea as you ever drank." A jorum is a large bowl or, more likely in this case, jug that is used to serve beverages; usually punch, but sometimes tea. It's sometimes also used to refer to the contents of such a vessel, often implying a great deal of such contents.

23:17 - "shining morning faces." This is a reference to the famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech (aka, "All the world's a stage...") from Act II, Scene VII of Shakespeare's As You Like It:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school.

Out of context, one might interpret "shining" to mean something like "beaming" or "eager" — which is definitely how Montgomery means it here — but nestled between "whining" and "creeping like a snail unwillingly to school," one wonders if maybe Shakespeare meant that their faces are shining with tears instead. I mean, read the rest of the speech. It's... not exactly optimistic.

28:57 - "slate bottle." This was actually a rather difficult one to find! Eliminating things like this and this still mostly brought up references to ink bottles, which doesn't make sense in this context as it clearly says that the bottle held water, and you wouldn't use ink on a slate anyway. The only (well, first, because then I stopped looking as I'd already gone pretty deep) explicit reference I found is in this 1889-1926 history of Eastling Primary School in Kent County, England, where a former student recalls "how happy she was when she... was given her own slate, her own water bottle with a hole in the cork, and a rag to clean her slate." I mean, you could probably have figured out that it was basically a very low-tech water spritzer for cleaning slates from the context and a basic knowledge of how slates work, but it's nice to have confirmation.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!