thought of something very different that I would be sure to think
was my besetting sin. Then Emma Jane said that rather than tell hers she
would resign from the Society and miss the picnic. So it made so
much trouble that Candace gave up. We struck out the rule from the
constitution and I had told my sin for nothing.

The reason we named ourselves the B.O.S.S. is that Minnie Smellie has
had her head shaved after scarlet fever and has no braid, so she can't
be a member.

I don't want her for a member but I can't be happy thinking she will
feel slighted, and it takes away half the pleasure of belonging to the
Society myself and being president.

That, I think, is the principal trouble about doing mean and unkind
things; that you can't do wrong and feel right, or be bad and feel good.
If you only could you could do anything that came into your mind yet
always be happy.

Minnie Smellie spoils everything she comes into but I suppose we
other girls must either have our hair shaved and call ourselves The
Baldheadians or let her be some kind of a special officer in the
B.O.S.S.

She might be the B.I.T.U.D. member (Braid in the Upper Drawer), for
there is where Mrs. Smellie keeps it now that it is cut off.

WINTER THOUGHTS

March, 187--

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. Perk