Publishers New York
Copyright 1910
The Bobbs-Merrill Company
THE ANNALS OF ANN
CHAPTER I
My Cousin Eunice is a grown young lady and she keeps a diary, which put the notion into my head of keeping one too.
There are two kinds of people that keep diaries, married ones and single ones. The single ones fill theirs full of poetry; the married ones tell how much it costs to keep house.
Not being extra good in grammar and spelling, I thought I'd copy a few pages out of Cousin Eunice's diary this morning as a pattern to keep mine by, but I was disappointed. Nearly every page I turned to in hers was filled full of poetry, which stuff never did make good sense to me, besides the trouble it puts you to by having to start every line with a fresh capital.
Cousin Eunice says nearly all famous people keep a diary for folks to read after they're dead. I always did admire famous people, especially Lord Byron and Columbus. And I've often thought I should like to be a famous person myself when I get grown. I don't care so much about graduating in white mull, trimmed in lace, as some girls do, for the really famous never graduate. They get expelled from college for writing little books saying there ain't any devil. But I should love to be a beautiful opera singer, with a jasmine flower at my throat, and a fresh duke standing at the side door of the theater every night, begging me to marry him. Or I'd like to rescue a ship full of drowning people, then swim back to shore and calmly squeeze the salt water out of my bathing suit, so the papers would all be full of it the next morning.