It is not such a cold day for March and I am up in the barn chamber with
my coat and hood on and Aunt Jane's waterproof and my mittens.
After I do three pages I am going to hide away this book in the haymow
till spring.
Perhaps they get made into icicles on the way but I do not seem to have
any thoughts in the winter time. The barn chamber is full of thoughts in
warm weather. The sky gives them to me, and the trees and flowers, and
the birds, and the river; but now it is always gray and nipping, the
branches are bare and the river is frozen.
It is too cold to write in my bedroom but while we still kept an open
fire I had a few thoughts, but now there is an air-tight stove in the
dining room where we sit, and we seem so close together, Aunt Miranda,
Aunt Jane and I that I don't like to write in my book for fear they will
ask me to read out loud my secret thoughts.
I have just read over the first part of my Thought Book and I have
outgrown it all, just exactly as I have outgrown my last year's drab
cashmere.
It is very queer how anybody can change so fast in a few months, but I
remember that Emma Jane's cat had kittens the day my book was bought at
Watson's store. Mrs. Perkins kept the prettiest white one, Abijah Flagg
drowning all the others.
It seems strange to me that cats will go on having kittens when they
know what becomes of them! We were very sad about it, but Mrs. Perkins
said it was the way of the world and how things had to be.
I cannot help being glad that they do not do the same with children, or
John and Jenny Mira Mark and me would all have had stones tied to our
necks and been dropped into the deepest part of Sunny Brook, for Hannah
and Fanny are the only truly handsome ones in the family.
Mrs. Perkins says I dress up well, but never being dressed up it does
not matter much. At least they didn't wait to dress up the kittens to
see how they would improve, before drowning them, but decided right
away.
Emma Jane's kitten that was born the same day this book was is now quite
an old cat who knows the way of the world herself, and how things have
to be, for she has had one batch of kittens drowned already.
So perhaps it is not strange that my Thought Book seems so babyish and
foolish to me when I think of all I have gone through and the millions
of things I have learned, and how much better I spell than I did ten
months ago.
My fingers are cold through the mittens, so good-bye dear Thought Book,
friend of my childhood, now so far far behind me!
I will hide you in the haymow where you'll be warm and cosy all the long
winter and where nobody can find you again in the summer time but your
affectionate author,
Rebecca Rowena Randall.