When I grow up I am going to marry a million-dollar man, so I can travel around the world and have a house in Paris with twenty bath-rooms in it.  And I’m going to have horses and automobiles and a private car and balloons, if they are working all right by that time.  I hope they will be, for I want something in which I can soar up and sit and look down on other people.

All my life people have looked down on me, passing me by like I was a Juny bug or a caterpillar, and I don’t wonder.  I’m merely Mary Cary with fifty-eight more just like me.  Blue calico, white dots for winter, white calico, blue dots for summer.  Black sailor hats and white sailor hats with blue capes for cold weather, and no fire to dress by, and freezing fingers when it’s cold, and no ice-water when it’s hot.

Yes, dear Mary, you and I are going to marry a rich man. (Martha is writing to-day.) I will try to love him, but if I can’t I will be polite to him and travel alone as much as possible.  But I am going to be rich some day.  I am.  And when I come back to Yorkburg eyes will bulge, for the clothes I am going to wear will make mouths water, they’re going to be so grand.  Miss Katherine would be ashamed of that and make me ashamed, but this writing is for the relief of feelings.

But there’s one thing I’m surer of than I am of being rich, and that is that there are to be no secrets about my children’s mother.  They are to know all about me I can tell, which won’t be much or distinguished, but what there is they’re to know.  And that’s the chief reason I’m going to write my history, so as to remember in case I forget.

Well, now I will begin.  I am eleven years and eleven months and three days old.  I don’t have birthday parties.  The Yorkburg Female Orphan Asylum is a large house with a wide hall in the middle, and a wing on one side that makes it look like Major Green, who lost one arm in the war.

There are large grounds around the house, and around the grounds is a high brick wall in front and a wooden fence back and sides.  The children and the chickens use the grounds at the back; the front has grass and flowers, and is for company, which is seldom.  Sometimes, just because I can’t help it, I chase a chicken through the front so as to know how it feels to run in the grass, which it is forbidden to do.

Forbidden things are so much nicer than unforbidden.  I love to do them until they’re done.

The Asylum is on King Street, almost at the very end, and there isn’t much passing, just the Tates and the Gordons and a few others living farther on.  The dining-room is in the basement, half below the ground, and on cloudy days the lamps have to be lighted—­that is, they used to.  Now we have electric lights, and I just love to turn them on.  It’s such a grand way to get a thing done, just to press a button.

The dining-room has a picture over the mantel of a cow standing in yellow-brown grass, and, though hideous, it’s a great comfort.  That cow understands our feelings at mealtimes, and we understand hers.