ood i have shaken off the of last night and am more like what father used to tell me to be when i was a of a girl a cheerful as right as a though to be sure i do not know what being as right as a is any more than i did then last night it is true there were circumstances that might have been urged for a week it had been the of a saint 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 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 the pages of her until the whole thing was like a composition written with tears in a 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 so last night may go and be forgotten as soon as i can manage to forget it to night things are different there has been a beautiful snow fall and the air is so crisp that when i went for a walk at sunset it seemed impossible ever to be weak again mother is wonderfully comfortable and the new year began with a letter to say that george will be at home to morrow mother is asleep like a child the fire is in the best of spirits and does the for itself and for peter who is with content expressed by every hair to the tip of his white tail even is singing in the kitchen a hymn that she thinks is cheerful about sa a a e ter er er noon it is evident that there is every opportunity to take a january fresh start and to conduct myself in the coming year with more self respect so much for new year resolutions i do not remember that i ever made one before and very likely i shall never make one again now i must decide something about i tried to talk with mother about her but mother got so excited that i saw it would not do and felt i must work the problem out with pen and paper as if it were a sum in it is not my business to attend to the education of the minister s daughter especially as it is the minister s daughter and he with his whole congregation thinks it rather doubtful whether it is not sinful for even to know so dangerous an i sometimes doubt whether my good neighbors in would regard tom himself who father used to say as the for all rural new england with greater horror than they do me it is fortunate that they do not dislike me personally and they all loved father in spite of his in this case i am not clear on the other hand that it is my duty to stand passive and see without at least protesting a sensitive imaginative delicate child driven to despair by the misery and terror of a creed if had not come to me it would be different but she has come time after time this poor little morbid creature has run to me in such terror of hell fire that i verily feared she would end by going frantic ten years old and desperate with conviction of original sin and this so near the end of the nineteenth century so called of grace thus far i have contented myself with taking her into my arms and just loving her into calmness but she is getting beyond that the of a saint she is finding being so delightful that she is sure it must be a sin she is like what i can fancy the most imaginative of the to have been in their passionate childhood in the days when the only recognized office of the imagination was to picture the terrors of hell i so long for father if he were alive to talk to her he could say the right word and settle things the bible is very touching in its phrase as one whom his mother but to me whom his father would have seemed to go even deeper but then there is s father whose tenderness is killing her i don t in the least doubt that he suffers as much as she does but he loves her too much to risk damage to what he calls her immortal soul there is always a ring of triumph in his voice when he the phrase as if he already were a spirit in eternal and infinite glory there is something finely noble in such a superstition all this however does not bring me nearer to the end of my sum for the answer of that ought to be what i shall do with it would never do to push her into a struggle with the or to set her to arguing out the impossibility of her she is too young and too morbid and would end by supposing that in reasoning at au on the matter she had committed the sin her father would not let her read stories unless they were books perhaps she might be allowed some of the more entertaining of history but she is too young for most of them she should be reading about bed hood and the white cat and the 