From Anne of Green Gables

A Letter from Tilly to Alice

An intimate letter from Avonlea

My dearest Alice,

I miss you so much that it feels like half of me is gone. I cry myself to sleep every night and I am so sad that nothing tastes good. I keep thinking about things that I want to tell you, about my crazy brothers, about our new cow who we call Mabel, and most of all town news.

So consider this letter your official hometown newspaper. We’ll call it the The Girl Gazette.

Headline: New Orphan Girl Puts Mrs. Lynde in Her Place

A tiny orphan girl has succeeded in doing what the grown folks of Avonlea have tried and failed to achieve for years. She stood right in front of the old crow and yelled in her face and stomped her feet.

The girl’s name is Anne, and she came from an orphan assylum in Hopetown. And get this - she has been adopted by none other than Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert of Green Gables.

I didn’t know that they let brothers and sisters adopt children. But then again, they are giving away orphans to anyone who says that they want one. How many orphan girls has Mrs. Blewett beaten, starved and worked to exhaustion before sending them back?

I am told that this Anne girl is very odd, but that should work well with Matthew and Marilla since they aren’t exactly the dictionary’s sketch of normalcy.

So this is what Mrs. Trannick told my Aunt Beatrice who told my mother: Mrs. Lynde became quite ill with influenza right after she heard that the orphan would soon arrive. You guys just missed a big outbreak. Nobody in our family got sick, but I hear that Emma’s family was hit pretty hard.

The two weeks that it took for her to recover must have been an agony of curiosity for Mrs. Lynde. So of course…