Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight

In which Miss Lavendar is sad and becomes increasingly attached to Paul, and the romantic ending to her story begins to come into focus, much to Anne's delight.

AAAH, look how cute this one is! Published by Sweet Cherry Publishing in 2018, with cover and illustrations by Elena Distefano. This is another oddly rare one to show an actual scene from the book, in this case Anne's embarrassing introduction to a famous author, when she was in kerchief and an old dress for cleaning and had just been changing the feathers in a mattress, oh and had accidentally turned her nose red. Ms. Distefano apparently decided to leave out the dyed nose, which admittedly would have looked rather odd and off-putting on a completely out-of-context cover. As it is, Anne just looks adorably flustered, and I love her.

Another extra-long one, so once again lots of notes coming your way!

5:50 - "fish days." Davy's talking about days where you "fast" by eating fish instead of meat, as Catholics used to do every Friday, and as several religions still do every Friday of Lent. It's established in the first book that the Cuthberts are Presbyterian and as near as I can tell they never had the "every Friday" rule, so he's likely just talking about various days of religious observation.

7:24 - "grow like pigweed in the night." "Pigweed" can apparently refer to any of a number of different weedy plants that have been used as pig feed, but I'm pretty sure this is probably referring to Amaranthus retroflexus. 

9:25 - "flourish like green bay trees." This is a reference to Psalm 37:35, which reads in the King James Bible as "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree." It's apparently more correctly translated as something like "a tree in its native soil." It didn't originally refer to any specific type of tree, but translations usually go with the bay laurel, an evergreen tree (thus, flourishing all year round) whose leaves were used to make the ancient Greek and Roman laurel wreaths and crowns and which, I am only just now learning, is the plant that the bay leaf comes from. Huh.

13:28 - "blue pills." This is vague enough that it could mean just about anything, but there's a good chance Miss Lavendar is referring to the medicine known as "blue mass," a — yikes — mercury-based medicine of the time that was prescribed for everything from syphilis to constipation to toothache to childbirth pains to tuberculosis. Miss Lavendar is probably talking about how it was also prescribed for melancholia (now known as "depression.") In fact, Abe Lincoln supposedly took it for just that reason, though of course he eventually died due to a different sort of heavy-metal poisoning altogether.

. . .too soon?

14:28 - "pelican of the wilderness." This is another Psalms reference, this one to Psalm 102:6, part of a prayer outlining how miserable and wretched the supplicant is: "I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert" (KJV, again.) Once again it's unclear what specific birds are being referred to here, with other translations going with some variety of owl. Regardless, it's some sort of solitary bird in the desert, or wilderness, or ruins, or wasteland. Basically the antithesis of Anne Shirley in a strawberry patch.

19:18 - "vine and fig tree." Another Biblical reference, though not Psalms this time. A version of the phrase is actually used three times: Micah 4:4, 1 Kings 4:25, and Zechariah 3:10, all of them basically referring to the simple joy of living on your own land.

26:20 - "subscribed to the salary." The salary of a local minister in towns like Avonlea were paid by the congregation themselves, who would all pledge to pay a certain amount to make the total promised. Mr Harrison has apparently agreed to pay a share as well.

28:52 - "capital of Afghanistan." Ooh, I know this one! It's Kabul!

28:54 - "dates of the Wars of the Roses." Ooh, I definitely do not know this one! They're apparently May 22, 1455 - June 16, 1487. The Wars of the Roses, incidentally, were a war between rival factions of the House of Plantagenet, the Yorks and the Lancasters, who both claimed the throne of England. They basically wiped each other out, ending with the Lancastrian Henry Tudor killing off Yorkie Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth, then taking the crown as Henry VII and marrying Elizabeth of York, uniting the houses (more or less) and creating the new House of Tudor. I'm sure there are some nuances I'm missing, but I got the dates and so am one up on Anne's students.

29:20 - "organdy." Organdy is a thin, semi-sheer, plain weave cotton fabric. It's best known as a stiff fabric used for curtains and petticoats, but there was also a soft version of it used for dresses.

29:49 - "Foreign Missions." Presumably, Miss Lavendar means she donated to the missionaries in the church who would go to foreign countries.

31:39 - "burst flower-like into rosy bloom." This is from the 1866 poem Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyl, by John Greenleaf Whittier. Whittier was a Quaker, and best known for his work and writings as an abolitionist. Abolition thankfully and by necessity went out of favor after the Civil War, at which point he wrote Snow-Bound, his most successful work. It's a long narrative poem, framed as a series of stories told by a family while snowed in. The quote in question is describing how the "old, rude-fashioned room" they are in lights up when the hearth-fire is lit.

38:00 - "Prince Charming." Okay, obviously you all know what this means, the stock fairy-tale prince who exists solely to rescue the heroine and provide her with a happily-ever-after marriage. Most famously, the princes in Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella fit the bill. But it did get me to wondering where the specific term came from. Not Disney, of course, since Anne of Avonlea predates any of his works by decades. Arguably, it indirectly grew from two tales by Madame d'Aulnoy written in the 1600s: The Story of Pretty Goldilocks (no, not that Goldilocks) in which the hero's name was Avenant ("Fine" or "Beautiful" in French), and The Blue Bird, in which the hero was Le roi Charmant ("The Charming King.") When Andrew Lang published these stories in the 1890s in his Blue and Green Fairy Books, respectively, he translated the names to "Charming" and "King Charming."

Close, but those guys aren't princes! It seems that the first known use of the exact term "Prince Charming" is in, of all places, the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. It's what the doomed actress Sibyl calls Dorian as he courts her. It's interesting that this first use of the term is already deconstructed and ironic, as (spoilers) Dorian is not exactly the hero of the tale, and certainly does not deliver a happily-ever-after to Sibyl.

41:23 - "nods and becks and wreathed smiles." This comes from the poem "L'Allegro" by John "Paradise Lost" Milton, published in 1645. "L'Allegro" means "The Happy Man," and it's a pastoral poem framed as a supplication to the Greek goddess Euphrosyne, the Grace of Mirth. The line is from a portion where he's asking her to appear:

Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles,
Nods, and Becks, and Wreathed Smiles...

The companion piece to this poem is "Il Penseroso," or "The Melancholy Man," a structurally identical poem where the writer dismisses all joy from his mind and hails an unnamed goddess of Melancholy. So. . . not so much Anne Shirley, except maybe in her more dramatic moments.

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

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

In which Anne has a very cranky day and finds her personal educational philosophy slipping, but then celebrates a pseudo-birthday by exploring the countryside and learning a terribly tragic story; and in which our narrator wonders whatever happened to Anne's toothache, because she should really get that checked out, seriously now.



Today's cover is from a 1995 Norstedts printing of the Swedish edition of Vår vän Anne. I like that this one shows Anne with (presumably) Davy and Dora, who I have never seen featured anywhere. Heck, they're hardly ever even mentioned when talking about these books, so it's rather nice to see them on a cover. In Sweden, anyway. I also appreciate that Davy looks like he's trying to claw his way out of those fancy clothes that are strangling him.

Unnecessarily complex notes to follow!


10:56 - "by what somebody has called 'a Herculaneum effort.'" Herculaneum was an ancient Roman city that was, like the more famous Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It was wealthier than Pompeii, and actually better preserved, containing organic remains like wood, food, beds, and even skeletons. The destruction of Pompeii, though, was famously witnessed and described by Pliny the Younger, so it's distinctly the better-known.

Of course, that doesn't have much to do with this quote, which is a malaprop for the idiom "a Herculean effort." I'm not sure who the "somebody" is that Montgomery is attributing this phrase to, though. My best guess comes from an 1894 travelogue called Our Journey Around the World, by Rev. Francis Clark and Harriet Clark, where the narrator says "with a Herculaneum effort, as Mrs. Partington would have said..." Mrs. Partington turns out to be a character created by American humorist B. P. Shillaber in the 1850s who is described as an American Mrs. Malaprop (who, in turn, was from the play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and who, of course, gave her name to the practice of humorously replacing one word for another, similar-sounding one). The texts the Mrs. Partington are from, though, don't appear to be readily available online, at least not in searchable form, and what I can find does not appear to use particular term. I found other people in the 1800s making this same malaprop, though, so maybe it was just a semi-common joke with no specific source.

12:58 - "plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased" Ah, okay, this one's easy. Anne here is adapting a quote from Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare's Macbeth:

MACBETH: How does your patient, doctor?

DOCTOR: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies
That keep her from rest.

MACBETH: Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon her heart.

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

One should note that by quoting this, Anne is casting herself in the part of Lady Macbeth, guilt-ridden over the murder of King Duncan.

13:37 - "Every morn is a fresh beginning / Every morn is the world made new." Anne here is caroling the start of the poem "New Every Morning," from the 1889 book A Few More Verses by Susan Coolidge (1835-1905, real name Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, and also author of, of course, Verses). As far as I know, it was never set to music. If it ever was, it most certainly was not whatever travesty I saddled it with.

17:45 - "harrowing." A harrow is an agricultural tool made up of many spikes, discs, or tines which are dragged across plowed soil to smooth it out and break up large clump of dirt, giving it a finer and more finished appearance  that is also better for seeding. This is also where the word "harrowing" comes from, as in "a harrowing experience." Because, well, imagine being dragged through this sucker.

18:17 - "Begone, dull care!" This comes from an old English folk song that dates back to at least the 1600s, and possibly earlier.

19:14 - "It would be too hot to hold some folks." ...yeah, no, I still have no idea what Jane is so "sagely quoting" here, if indeed anything.
 
20:21 - "elephant's ears." I'm not sure which of the various related plants referred to as "elephant ears" they are referring to, but as far as I can tell none of them would be described as "graceful" or "feathery," or appropriate for "picking a big bunch," as they're primarily known for their very large, leathery, heart-shaped leaves rather than their flowers.


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

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Ten and Eleven

In which Davy makes a good deal of trouble due to not being brought up right, and Anne writes a letter to someone we don't care about relating numerous funny, strange, or creative things her students have said; and in which our narrator is pretty sure that if Anne were around today she'd totally have her own Tumblr.



Today's cover is from Sterling Publishing in 2008 and makes the unusual choice of showing Anne as a teacher, with her class. I hadn't really realized it before, but it really is a bit odd that so few covers seem to depict her in this way, considering how a big part of this book relates to her teaching and relationships with her students. Here's a fun game: try and figure out which of these students are the saintly Paul Irving, the terrible Anthony Pye, the put-upon St. Clair Donnel, the clumsy Barbara Shaw, and the coquettish Prillie Rogerson! And wonder if the illustrator actually tried to represent the specific children or not! (I really have no idea if they did or did not.)

Notes:

12:59 - "asseverated." Man, the Pyes animadvert, Davy asseverates... Ms. Montgomery, I love you and I love your work, but you need to put down your thesaurus for a while. You can just say that Davy declared, or asserted, or stated earnestly or something.

21:00 - "Thomas à Becket." AKA St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry II in the twelfth century. Though the two had started out as friends, after his election to the archbishopship (... is that a word? That doesn't look right.) Becket had a bit of a change of heart and came into conflict with the king regarding the relative rights of the crown and the church. It got so bad between them that in 1170 Henry said... something. It's uncertain what, exactly, though tradition states it was "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Whatever it was, it was interpreted (rightly or wrongly) by four of his knights as an order. They found Becket in Canterbury and demanded he come and account for himself. He refused, went in to say vespers, and they killed him. The Catholic and Anglican churches both venerate him as a martyr and a saint.

You might notice something missing from the above account, though: the "à." It's not actually part of his name, and no one's entirely sure why people sometime in the 1600s or so started putting it in there. Some say it was in imitation of Thomas à Kempis for some unknown reason. It doesn't even make sense in Becket's name, because it means "of" or "from" (so Kempis's name actually means "Thomas from Kempen," where Kempen was his hometown.) But Becket wasn't from anywhere named "Becket." One of those weird linguistic mysteries how it really got and stayed there for so long.

21:05 - "William Tyndale wrote the New Testament." Tyndale was a 16th-century English scholar, best known for his translation of the Bible into English at a time when unauthorized English Bibles were against the laws of both the Church of England and England itself. His was also the first English Bible to work directly from Greek and Hebrew texts (rather than working from later translations into Latin), and the first to be printed on the printing press. He later went on to vocally disapprove of King Henry VIII's divorces. For these varied crimes, he was eventually convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Well, strangled to death while tied to the stake, and then burned.

21:09 - "Claude White says a 'glacier' is a man who puts in window frames!" Claude White is of course looking for the word "glazier."

22:32 - "carded rolls." Carding is a process of basically turning a raw, fibrous material like cotton or wool into a useful form by untangling the fibers, laying them out parallel to each other, and locking them together in a sort of web, using a sort of brush/comb called a card. This creates a sort of mat that can be pulled up off the card in rolls that can then be used to spin out yarn.


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

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!

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," Part One

In which we are introduced to the town of Sleepy Hollow; its itinerant schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane; wealthy coquette Katrina Van Tassel; and local hero and roustabout Brom Bones; and in which we hear of the local superstition of the headless horseman; and Ichabod departs for a dinner party.



New short story! One of the most enduring examples of early American fiction, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" was originally published in 1820 as part of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., a collection of Irving's short works. This book is commonly considered, along with James Fenimore Cooper's The Leatherstocking Tales, one of the first works of American literature to be widely read back in Europe. Perhaps even more than anything by Cooper, "Sleepy Hollow" (and Irving's other best-known work, "Rip Van Winkle," also published in The Sketch Book) is one of those stories that has entered the American lexicon. Even those who've never read the story have an idea what you mean when you describe someone as looking like Ichabod Crane, and the image of the Headless Horseman, brandishing his flaming pumpkin aloft, has indelibly etched itself into our collective brain.

The illustrations I've picked out come from two different sources. The color illustrations are by Felix Octavius Carr Darley (more commonly known by F. O. C. Darley, and who can blame him) from an 1849 printing of The Sketch Book. Darley was considered one of the preeminent "genre" illustrators of the mid-1800s, creating watercolors or line illustrations for Irving, Cooper, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Clement C. Moore, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many more. The black and white illustrations are from an 1863 edition, and are done by a variety of artists, who will be credited by their respective illustrations. Near as I can tell, only a few of these were actually created specifically to illustrate "Sleepy Hollow;" several are landscapes done by prominent local artists known specifically for, well, landscapes, and not for book illustrations, so I think they were preexisting works pressed into service for this printing. Several of said artists were followers of the Hudson River School of art, which focused on romantic landscapes of the Hudson River Valley and the surrounding mountains.

Oh, and due to the length of this story, I've broken it into two parts, of which this is obviously the first.

3:21 - "View in Sleepy Hollow," by William Hart (from a sketch by J. H. Hill)

This is one of those landscape works I mentioned.  William Hart was one of those members of the Hudson River School, and was known for his landscapes involving strong angled sunlight, foreground shadow, and cows. He, uh, painted a lot of cows. He is also the maternal grandfather of E. B. "bet I can make you cry over a spider" White. I haven't been able to figure out for sure who J. H. Hill was, but another of the pictures are by Hart from a sketch of his, so maybe he was some sort of assistant?

Much more after the jump!

Sense and Sensibility, Volume the Second, Chapter Fourteen

In which we meet the incredibly charming — and puppyish — Robert Ferrars, and the Misses Steele are again shown unaccountable preference by Edward's family in order to snub the Misses Dashwood.



Now seriously, come on, how much do you just LOVE Mr. Robert Ferrars, he of the toothpick case? I just delight in a good snob.

Two quick notes before the single illustration: at 7:54, we hear that the compliments offered to Marianne by Miss Steele following a close scrutiny of everything her appearance were intended as a "douceur." This is another word for some kind of inducement or incentive, or sometimes a bribe. Literally, it means "sweetener," and is related to words like dulce and dulcet. Importantly, the "c" is pronounced as an "s," not as "sh."

Then, at 9:07, we hear that the musicians are playing a violoncello, which is the full name of what we now usually refer to as a cello.

Shortly thereafter, we meet Robert Ferrars in an illustration that is actually the frontispiece to this edition, but obviously makes much more sense for me to show here:

9:37 - Mr. Dashwood introduced him.

Last, at 12:25, Robert is bloviating about how his friend showed him "three plans of Bonomi's," which he promptly threw in the fire. This refers to Joseph Bonomi the Elder (1739-1808), an Italian architect who took up residence in London and was rather fashionable there around the time this story is taking place.

And that's the end of Volume the Second! Next time, we'll get started on the third and final volume.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg, and high-res copies of the Thompson illustrations can be found in the British Library's Flickr stream. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Green Gables, Chapters Twenty-Nine and Thirty

In which Anne goes on a Big City Adventure only to end up ruminating on the importance and joy of home, or something, following which Anne's educational future is discussed.



Right off the bat, we've got Anne reciting part of a poem now little-known among the general populace: "Marmion," by Sir Walter Scott. It's apparently about one Lord Marmion, a rather obscure figure even at the time, and his involvement in the hilariously-named Battle of Flodden Field between England and Scotland in 1513. I apologize for not quite managing to read all the way through "The stubborn spearsman still made good / Their dark impenetrable wood" without snickering. At least I didn't "stop in ecstasy," like Anne.

Then, of course, we find Anne getting caught reading Ben Hur instead of her lessons. Ben Hur is of course now most well-known for its spectacular movie productions, especially the 1959 version starring Moses. I will not be featuring it on "Rob Reads to You." The other book Anne was caught reading, The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hill, though, sadly seems to be fictional.

I've also determined that I love the phrase "meaner than second skimmings," presumably referring to skimming cream off the top of milk, and how little there is left the second time around. This is one I really want to work into daily conversation.

And, um, I think I may need to start keeping a running tally of voices I've done while reading these books, because come to the end-of-school-year scene I could not for the LIFE of me remember if we've heard Miss Stacy talk before or not. I don't think so? Pretty sure? If we have, and I did the voice real different this time around, it's 'cause she had a cold.

Finally we've got this installment's cover and... what the crap is this? It's all... sexy, and blonde -- I think it's mentioned once or twice, Anne has red hair -- and distinctly modern-day. Seems I'm not the only one to think this isn't such a great cover. In fact, I only found this because of all the outraged news articles. That's one of the things with public domain books, though. Anyone with a printing press can crank out a cheap paperback version, or even just an e-book version, and put it up for sale, regardless of how well they're presenting the material. It looks like this was some tiny, no-name publisher we're talking about, so it's not like one of the big publishing houses turned out this thing. And in fact, it looks like they've indirectly responded to the 400+ one-star reviews on Amazon, and have taken the cover down.


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

Anne of Green Gables, Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen

In which Anne and Diana have a lovely tea that ends in tragic debauchery and the girls are forbidden from seeing each other again, they bid farewell and express their love for each other in a manner that reads somewhat differently in modern times, at which point Anne decides to return to school where she'll show them, she'll show them all.



Ms. Montgomery has an interesting tendency to quote within the narration, which I hope is coming across as I'm reading. As Anne is lamenting that Diana is not acknowledging her whatsoever in school (before receiving Diana's note), we hear "The Caesar's pageant shorn of Brutus' bust / Did but of Rome's best son remind her more," which is a quote from Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, but a quick Google search on it comes up with Anne of Green Gables nearly as often as Byron. Who's the bigger romantic now, huh?

This time around we've got a French edition from 2008 entitled Anne et le bonheur, which, near as I can translate, means "Anne and happiness," which I suppose sums it all up, in a way. I am a bit unsure as to whether this is in fact Anne of Green Gables proper or not, despite being tagged as such in this cover gallery, as a search brings up this French Wikipedia page listing the French title of Green Gables as Anne... La maison aux pignons verts, which looks like it makes a lot more sense. None of the other books in the series are listed as Anne et le bonheur, though, and all other pages I get as search results are in French. Any French speakers want to take a crack at this?

Anywho, I mostly wanted to post this one because, while I'm certainly no expert on fashion history, Anne's outfit here makes me think less of 1908 and more like she's about to toss her hat up in a freeze frame.


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

Anne of Green Gables, Chapter Fifteen

In which Anne begins to attend school, where the last of the major players is introduced with the most dreadful insult, and Anne decides that Canadian public education has failed her.



We've got an especially good illustration this time around, of Anne about to full on break a hunk of slate over Gilbert's head because he called her "Carrots." YES.

12:32 - "Thwack! Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert's head." Could the
word "Gilbert" really not fit on the next line, it had to be split in the middle like that?

I mean, yes, I know that classroom slates are real thin and it's not like she dropped a paving stone on his skull or anything but still. Sweet. You can tell these two are meant to be together. What, that's no spoiler or nothing. Just look at that picture up there. If that's not true love, I don't know what is.

Oh, and hey, I just realized a missed an illustration back in chapters 9-11, so you might want to go on back and take a look-see.


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