said Nancy , plucking up heart of grace at something in Peter 's tone and look . `` For -- kerrecting mistakes . '' `` Grammatical ones ? '' `` Not exactly . I guess them mistakes are past kerrecting in an old fellow like me . Worse mistakes , Nancy . I wonder what you would say if I asked you to forgive me , and have me after all . '' `` I 'd snap you up before you 'd have time to change your mind , '' said Nancy brazenly . She tried to look Peter in the face , but her blue eyes , where tears and mirth were blending , faltered down before his gray ones . Peter stood up , knocking over his chair , and strode around the table to her . `` Nancy , my girl ! '' INTRODUCTION It is no exaggeration to say that what Longfellow did for Acadia , Miss Montgomery has done for Prince Edward Island . More than a million readers , young people as well as their parents and uncles and aunts , possess in the picture-galleries of their memories the exquisite landscapes of Avonlea , limned with as poetic a pencil as Longfellow wielded when he told the ever-moving story of Grand Pre . Only genius of the first water has the ability to conjure up such a character as Anne Shirley , the heroine of Miss Montgomery 's first novel , `` Anne of Green Gables , '' and to surround her with people so distinctive , so real , so true to psychology . Anne is as lovable a child as lives in all fiction . Natasha in Count Tolstoi 's great novel , `` War and Peace , '' dances into our ken , with something of the same buoyancy and naturalness ; but into what a commonplace young woman she develops ! Anne , whether as the gay little orphan in her conquest of the master and mistress of Green Gables , or as the maturing and self-forgetful maiden of Avonlea , keeps up to concert-pitch in her charm and her winsomeness . There is nothing in her to disappoint hope or imagination . Part of the power of Miss Montgomery -- and the largest part -- is due to her skill in compounding humor and pathos . The humor is honest and golden ; it never wearies the reader ; the pathos is never sentimentalized , never degenerates into bathos , is never morbid .
This combination holds throughout all her works , longer or shorter , and is particularly manifest in the present collection of fifteen short stories , which , together with those in the first volume of the Chronicles XXXXX Avonlea , present a series of piquant and fascinating pictures of life in Prince Edward Island .
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