ins 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.

Fourth Chronicle. A TRAGEDY IN MILLINERY

I

Emma Jane Perkins's new winter dress was a blue and green Scotch plaid
poplin, trimmed with narrow green velvet-ribbon and steel nail-heads.
She had a gray jacket of thick furry cloth with large steel buttons
up the front, a pair of green kid gloves, and a gray felt hat with an
encircling band of bright green feathers. The band began in front with
a bird's head and ended behind with a bird's tail, and angels could have
desired no more beautiful toilette. That was her opinion, and it was
shared to the full by Rebecca.

But Emma Jane, as Rebecca had once described her to Mr. Adam Ladd, was
a rich blacksmith's daughter, and she, Rebecca, was a little half-orphan
from a mortgaged farm "up Temperance way," dependent upon her spinster
aunts for board, clothes, and schooling. Scotch plaid poplins were
manifestly not for her, but dark-colored woolen stuffs were, and
mittens, and last