The Diary of a Saint

Books by Arlo Bates.
‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ THE DIARY OF A SAINT. Crown 8vo, $1.50. LOVE IN A CLOUD. A Novel. Crown 8vo, $1.50. THE PURITANS. A Novel. Crown 8vo, $1.50. THE PHILISTINES. A Novel. 12mo, $1.50. THE PAGANS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.00. PATTY'S PERVERSITIES. A Novel. 16mo, $1.00; paper, 50 cents. PRINCE VANCE. The Story of a Prince with a Court in his Box. By Arlo Bates and Eleanor Putnam. Crown 8vo, $1.50. A LAD'S LOVE. 16mo, $1.00. UNDER THE BEECH-TREE. Poems. Crown 8vo, $1.50. TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH. First Series. Crown 8vo, $1.50. TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH. Second Series. Crown 8vo, $1.30, net . TALKS ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. Boston and New York.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY The Riverside Press, Cambridge 1902
COPYRIGHT 1902 BY ARLO BATES ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published September, 1902

January 1. How beautiful the world is! I might go on to say, and how commonplace this seems written down in a diary; but it is the thing I have been thinking. I have been standing ever so long at the window, and now that the curtains are shut I can see everything still. The moon is shining over the wide white sheets of snow, and the low meadows look far off and enchanted. The outline of the hills is clear against the sky, and the cedars on the lawn are almost green against the whiteness of the ground and the deep, blue-black sky. It is all so lovely that it somehow makes one feel happy and humble both at once.
It is a beautiful world, indeed, and yet last night—
But last night was another year, and the new begins in a better mood. I have shaken off the idiotic mawkishness of last night, and am more like what Father used to tell me to be when I was a mite of a girl: A cheerful Ruth Privet, as right as a trivet. Though to be sure I do not know what being as right as a trivet is, any more than I did then. Last night, it is true, there were alleviating circumstances that might have been urged. For a week it had been drizzly, unseasonable weather that took all the snap out of a body's mental fibre; Mother had had one of her bad days, when the pain seemed too dreadful to bear, patient angel that she is; Kathie Thurston had been in one of her most despairing fits; and the Old Year looked so dreary behind, the New Year loomed so hopeless before, that there was some excuse for a girl who was tired to the bone with watching and worry if she did not feel exactly cheerful. I cannot allow, though, that it justified her in crying like a watering-pot, and smudging the pages of her diary until the whole thing was blurred like a composition written with tears in a primary school. I certainly cannot let this sort of thing happen again, and I am thoroughly ashamed that it happened once. I will remember that the last day Father lived he said he could trust me to be brave both for Mother and myself; and that I promised,—I promised.