City and town life -- Fiction; Diary fiction; Girls -- Fiction; Love stories, American
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.
It wouldn't hardly be worth while for me to change my name now,
because I change my mind so often. I'm a great hand to start a thing
and then branch off and start something entirely different, such as
learning how to make the table walk, and pyrography. Cousin Eunice
said one day when she looked around at the things I had in my room
that it reminded her of Pompeii when they dug it up--so many things
started that never would be finished.
One of the things we enjoyed most at Cousin Eunice's was walking out
to a lovely old cemetery not very far from her house. It is so old and
so beautiful that you're sure all the people in the graves must have
gone to Heaven long ago. Along in April, when the iris and
lilies-of-the-valley are in bloom and the birds and trees and sky all
seem to be so happy, you look around at those peaceful graves and you
don't believe in hell one bit. You think God is a heap better than
folks give Him credit for being. But I hope this will never come to
Brother Sheffield's ears, for he thinks you're certainly going there
if you don't believe in a hell worse than the Standard Oil Company on
fire.
While I'm on this kind of subject I want to tell something that Rufe
said last winter, but I'm afraid to, for if mother ever saw it she
would get Brother Sheffield to hold a special meeting for Rufe. I
might risk it and then lock my diary up tight. Rufe said one time when
I remarked that I liked St. John better than St. Paul: "No wonder! St.
John's _liver_ was in good working order!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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