The Annals of Ann

by Kate Trimble Sharber

I got this far last night when Mammy Lou passed by my window on her way to her house from the kitchen and stopped long enough to make me go to bed. She says it takes a sight of sleep and a "passel o' victuals" for a girl of my age, and I don't have enough of either.

"I'se shore goin' 'er tell Mis' Mary how you set up uv a night," she said, very fiercely, but she couldn't shake her finger at me for it took both hands to hold the big pan she had under her apron. "An' as fer eatin'! Why, a red bug eats more! An' such truck! Candy and apples and fried chicken and fried Saratoga chips! Fries nuvver was no good for nobody at the gawky age, nohow. It takes boils to fatten them!"

I promised I'd go on to bed and eat nothing but "boils" to please her if she wouldn't tell father and mother how late I sit up, so she promised. She never would tell anyhow.

I believe the next thing I wanted to mention about was the theaters they used to take me to on Friday night when there wasn't any lessons. I just love the theater. I believe if I don't decide to be a trained nurse, although I am sure that is what I was cut out for, I may be an actress. When they used to tell me pitiful tales at Sunday-school about the heathen I was sure I wanted to be a missionary to Japan. Mother used to take me to a tea store with her every time we went into the city to buy things we couldn't get at home and the walls were covered with pictures of Japan. I never will forget how blue the sky was nor how white the clouds, and it seemed the loveliest country in the world to me, except home. And I would look at mother and wonder how she would feel if I told her that some day I was going to leave her and father and sail away to that beautiful land where the poor, ignorant people didn't know how to wear corsets nor eat hog meat. Of course they needed somebody to tell them what they were missing and I was eager to be that one!

That was a long time ago! I know more about Japan now! I know more about America too! Doctor Gordon said one night last winter that if some of the missionaries were to go all over this country and tell folks to open their windows and stop murdering their babies with candy and bananas they would do more good than trying to teach the Japanese so much. He said he didn't know which was the more heathenish, to throw children in the river and let them have a quick death or stuff them on fried meat and pickles and let them die by slow torture.

The mothers are hard to teach, he says, because they don't more than leave the doctor's office with a poor little pale baby than they meet an old woman who tells them not to let the child be doctored to death, to "feed 'im." They will tell the mother "Didn't I have eleven? And everything I et, they et!"

He told us so many stories of murdered babies that I got to feeling like I'd prefer being a nurse in a day home. I love babies! And Doctor Gordon has the loveliest eyes!—But I haven't got to him yet.

Speaking of the theater, I got to see many notorious people on the stage this winter. Rufe said I would get a great variety of ideas from the best plays. I did. I got a great variety of Ideals too. One time he would be tall, fair and brave, with a Scotch name, like Marmaduke Cameron, or Bruce MacPherson. Then the very next time I'd go he'd change his looks and disposition.

I loved some of the operas, too, especially Il Trovatore. I wish the singers were slender, though. It hurts your feelings to have the "voice that rang from that donjon tower" belonging to a great fat man with no head to speak of, and what he has consisting mainly of jaws. Of all the songs on record (not phonographic record) next to Dixie and La Paloma I believe I love Ah, I have sighed to rest me! The words to this are not so loving, but the tune is so pitiful.

I wish my name was Dolores Lovelock, or Anita Messala, and I could get shut up in a tower. I have a girl friend in the city and every time we write to each other we sign the name we're wishing most was ours at that very minute. Her last letter was signed "Undine Valentine," but I don't think that's half as pretty as Mercedes Ficediola.