MARIA THOMPSON DAVIESS

Leaf I.

The Bachelor’s-Buttons.

I don’t know how all this is going to end, and I wish my mind wasn’t in a kind of tingle.  However, I’ll do the best I can and not hold myself at all responsible for myself, and then who will there be to blame?

There are a great many kinds of good-feeling in this world, from radiant joy down to perfect bliss; but this spring I have got an attack of just old-fashioned happiness that looks as if it might become chronic.

I am so happy that I planted my garden all crooked, my eyes upon the clouds with the birds sailing against them, and when I became conscious I found wicked flaunting poppies sprouted right up against the sweet modest clove-pinks, while the whole paper of bachelor’s-buttons was sowed over everything—­which I immediately began to dig right up again, blushing furiously to myself over the trowel, and glad that I had caught myself before they grew up to laugh in my face.  However, I got that laugh anyway, and I might just as well have left them, for Billy ran to the gate and called Dr. John to come in and make Molly stop digging up his buttons.  Billy claims everything in this garden, and he thought they would grow up into the kind of buttons you pop out of a gun.

“So you’re digging up the bachelor-buttons, Mrs. Molly?” the doctor asked as he leaned over the gate.  I went on digging without looking up at him.  I couldn’t look up because I was blushing still worse.  Sometimes I hate that man, and if he wasn’t Billy’s father I wouldn’t be as friendly with him as I am.  But somebody has to look after Billy.

I believe it will be a real relief to write down how I feel about him in his old book, and I shall do it whenever I can’t stand him any longer; and if he gave the horrid, red leather thing to me to make me miserable he can’t do it; not this spring!  I wish I dare burn it up and forget about it, but I daren’t!  This record on the first page is enough to reduce me—­to tears, and I wonder why it doesn’t.

I weigh one hundred and sixty pounds, set down in black and white, and it is a tragedy!  I don’t believe that man at the weighing machine is so very reliable in his weights, though he had a very pleasant smile while he was weighing me.  Still, I had better get some scales of my own, smiles are so deceptive.

I am five feet three inches tall or short, whichever way one looks at me.  I thought I was taller, but I suppose I shall have to believe my own yardstick.

But as to my waist measure, I positively refuse to write that down, even if I have half promised Dr. John a dozen times over to do it, while I only really left him to suppose I would.  It is bad enough to know that your belt has to be reduced to twenty-three inches without putting down how much it measures now in figures to insult yourself with.  No, I intend to have this for my happy spring.