Chapter XV

CHAPTER XV

A Tempest in the School Teapot

"What a splendid day!" said Anne, drawing a long breath. "Isn't
it good just to be alive on a day like this? I pity the people
who aren't born yet for missing it. They may have good days, of
course, but they can never have this one. And it's splendider
still to have such a lovely way to go to school by, isn't it?"

"It's a lot nicer than going round by the road; that is so dusty
and hot," said Diana practically, peeping into her dinner basket
and mentally calculating if the three juicy, toothsome, raspberry
tarts reposing there were divided among ten girls how many bites
each girl would have.

The little girls of Avonlea school always pooled their lunches,
and to eat three raspberry tarts all alone or even to share them
only with one's best chum would have forever and ever branded as
"awful mean" the girl who did it. And yet, when the tarts were
divided among ten girls you just got enough to tantalize you.

The way Anne and Diana went to school WAS a pretty one. Anne
thought those walks to and from school with Diana couldn't be
improved upon even by imagination. Going around by the main road
would have been so unromantic; but to go by Lover's Lane and
Willowmere and Violet Vale and the Birch Path was romantic, if
ever anything was.

Lover's Lane opened out below the orchard at Green Gables and
stretched far up into the woods to the end of the Cuthbert farm.
It was the way by which the cows were taken to the back pasture
and the wood hauled home in winter. Anne had named it Lover's
Lane before she had been a month at Green Gables.

"Not that lovers ever really walk there," she explained to Marilla,
"but Diana and I are reading a perfectly magnificent book and there's
a Lover's Lane in it. So we want to have one, too. And it's a very
pretty name, don't you think? So romantic! We can't imagine the
lovers into it, you know. I like that lane because you can think
out loud there without people calling you crazy."

Anne, starting out alone in the morning, went down Lover's Lane
as far as the brook. Here Diana met her, and the two little
girls went on up the lane under the leafy arch of maples--"maples
are such sociable trees," said Anne; "they're always rustling and
whispering to you"--until they came to a rustic bridge. Then
they left the lane and walked through Mr. Barry's back field and
past Willowmere. Beyond Willowmere came Violet Vale--a little
green dimple in the shadow of Mr. Andrew Bell's big woods. "Of
course there are no violets there now," Anne told Marilla, "but
Diana says there are millions of them in spring. Oh, Marilla,
can't you just imagine you see them? It actually takes away my
breath. I named