She had sat up until nearly twelve the preceding night composing a speech she meant to make to her pupils upon opening the school . She had revised and improved it painstakingly , and then she had learned it off by heart . It was a very good speech and had some very fine ideas in it , especially about mutual help and earnest striving after knowledge . The only trouble was that she could not now remember a word of it . After what seemed to her a year ... about ten seconds in reality ... she said faintly , `` Take your Testaments , please , '' and sank breathlessly into her chair under cover of the rustle and clatter of desk lids that followed . While the children read their verses Anne marshalled her shaky wits into order and looked over the array of little pilgrims to the Grownup Land . Most of them were , of course , quite well known to her . Her own classmates had passed out in the preceding year but the rest had all gone to school with her , excepting the primer class and ten newcomers to Avonlea . Anne secretly felt more interest in these ten than in those whose possibilities were already fairly well mapped out to her . To be sure , they might be just as commonplace as the rest ; but on the other hand there MIGHT be a genius among them . It was a thrilling idea . Sitting by himself at a corner desk was Anthony Pye . He had a dark , sullen little face , and was staring at Anne with a hostile expression in his black eyes . Anne instantly made up her mind that she would win that boy 's affection and discomfit the Pyes utterly . In the other corner another strange boy was sitting with Arty Sloane ... a jolly looking little chap , with a snub nose , freckled face , and big , light blue eyes , fringed with whitish lashes ... probably the DonNELL boy ; and if resemblance went for anything , his sister was sitting across the aisle with Mary Bell . Anne wondered what sort of mother the child had , to send her to school dressed as she was . She wore a faded pink silk dress , trimmed with a great deal of cotton lace , soiled white kid slippers , and silk stockings . Her sandy hair was tortured into innumerable kinky and unnatural curls , surmounted by a flamboyant bow of pink ribbon bigger than her head . Judging from her expression she was very well satisfied with herself . A pale little thing , with smooth ripples of fine , silky , fawn-colored hair flowing over her shoulders , must , Anne thought , be Annetta Bell , whose parents had formerly lived in the Newbridge school district , but , by reason of hauling their house fifty yards north of its old site were now in Avonlea .
Three pallid little girls crowded into one seat were certainly Cottons ; and there was no doubt that the small beauty XXXXX the long brown curls and hazel eyes , who was casting coquettish looks at Jack Gills over the edge of her Testament , was Prillie Rogerson , whose father had recently married a second wife and brought Prillie home from her grandmother 's in Grafton .
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