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Jane Andrews has been talking for a month about how glad she'd be when Mr. Phillips went away and she declared she'd never shed a tear.

Well, she was worse than any of us and had to borrow a handkerchief from her brother-of course the boys didn't cry-because she hadn't brought one of her own, not expecting to need it.

Oh, Marilla, it was heartrending.

Mr. Phillips made such a beautiful farewell speech beginning, 'The time has come for us to part.' It was very affecting.

And he had tears in his eyes too, Marilla.

Oh, I felt dreadfully sorry and remorseful for all the times I'd talked in school and drawn pictures of him on my slate and made fun of him and Prissy.

I can tell you I wished I'd been a model pupil like Minnie Andrews.

She hadn't anything on her conscience.

The girls cried all the way home from school.

Carrie Sloane kept saying every few minutes, 'The time has come for us to part,' and that would start us off again whenever we were in any danger of cheering up.

I do feel dreadfully sad, Marilla.

But one can't feel quite in the depths of despair with two months' vacation before them, can they, Marilla? And besides, we met the new minister and his wife coming from the station.

For all I was feeling so bad about Mr. Phillips going away I couldn't help taking a little interest in a new minister, could I? His wife is very pretty.

Not exactly regally lovely, of course-it wouldn't do, I suppose, for a minister to have a regally lovely wife, because it might set a bad example.

Mrs. Lynde says the minister's wife over at Newbridge sets a very bad example because she dresses so fashionably.

Our new minister's wife was dressed in blue muslin with lovely puffed sleeves and a hat trimmed with roses.

Jane Andrews said she thought puffed sleeves were too worldly for a minister's wife, but I didn't make any such uncharitable remark, Marilla, because I know what it is to long for puffed sleeves.

Besides, she's only been a minister's wife for a little while, so one should make allowances, shouldn't they? They are going to board with Mrs. Lynde until the manse is ready."

If Marilla, in going down to Mrs. Lynde's that evening, was actuated by any motive save her avowed one of returning the quilting frames she had borrowed the preceding winter, it was an amiable weakness shared by most of the Avonlea people.

Many a thing Mrs. Lynde had lent, sometimes never expecting to see it again, came home that night in charge of the borrowers thereof.

A new minister, and moreover a minister with a wife, was a lawful object of curiosity in a quiet little country settlement where sensations were few and far between.

Old Mr. Bentley, the minister whom Anne had found lacking in imagination, had been pastor of Avonlea for eighteen years.

He was a widower when he came, and a widower he remained, despite the fact that gossip regularly married him to this, that, or the other one, every year of his sojourn.

In the preceding February he had resigned his charge and departed amid the regrets of his people, most of whom had the affection born of long intercourse for their good old minister in spite of his shortcomings as an orator.

Since then the Avonlea church had enjoyed a variety of religious dissipation in listening to the many and various candidates and "supplies" who came Sunday after Sunday to preach on trial.

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