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Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables, just where the e spanned the brook below the Haunted Wood, and they sat down by thelike curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from a nap

"I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my birthday on Saturday," said Anne

"Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!"

"That wasn't hed Anne "If my parents had consulted me it would never have happened then I should have chosen to be born in spring, of course It htful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets You would always feel that you were their foster sister But since I didn't, the next best thing is to celebrateover Saturday and Jane will be hoolden dayWe none of us really know her yet, but we'll meet her back there as we never can anywhere else I want to explore all those fields and lonely places anyhow I have a conviction that there are scores of beautiful nooks there that have never really been SEEN although they may have been LOOKED at We'llho in our hearts"

"It SOUNDS awfully nice," said Diana, with soic of words "But won't it be very damp in some places yet?"

"Oh, we'll wear rubbers," was Anne's concession to practicalities

"And I want you to co and help s possiblethings that will , you understandlittle jelly tarts and lady fingers, and drop cookies frosted with pink and yellow icing, and buttercup cake And we h they're NOT very poetical"

Saturday proved an ideal day for a picnica day of breeze and blue, war across meadow and orchard Over every sunlit upland and field was a delicate, flower-starred green

Mr Harrison, harrowing at the back of his far witch-work even in his sober,across the end of his field where it joined a fringing woodland of birch and 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 irls, a day to which we can always look back with delight