From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
This is Saturday. Grandfather says that school work comes before dancing school, so I must stay home today and write my composition. I started to write about an hour glass. That is a thing made of two glasses with a teeny weeny hole between them. You pour sand in one of the glasses, turn it upside down, and then it runs just a few grains at a time into the other glass. When the other glass is full, you know that it is an hour and you turn that filled one upside down and start it all over again. But then I began to wonder what would happen if you weren’t in the room and you came back and found the glass all filled and didn’t know how much time went by before you discovered it. You would always have to have the hour glass with you, and I don’t think it would be a good way to tell time if you had to catch a train, and you could never take your eyes off of it. So then because I didn’t think it was a good thing to rely on I couldn’t write a composition about it. I couldn’t think of anything to say about the mummies either, because they are just dead Egyptians all wrapped up in strips of cloth. I kept wondering if one of them was Cleopatra, but then Miss Cashen said she didn’t think so. Cleopatra was a beautiful Egyptian queen who was killed by an asp or a wasp. I am not sure what an asp is and I’ll try to remember to ask someone. The suits of armor made me think of the Tin Woodsman in “The Wizard of ‘Oz’” but I think Miss Cashen wouldn’t want me to say that. At last I decided to write about the pens we saw because it said that they were just like the ones that George Washington wrote with. They were made with goose quills. There were no blotters in those days, so people had to dry the ink on their letters with sand and they kept the sand in salt shakers and sprinkled it on the paper. I shall hand in my paper Monday morning and I hope Miss Cashen will like it.
Hilda’s entry today confirms that she read the Oz books. In her September 6th entry she recalled the story of a yellow hen whose name she thought was Belinda, but was probably Billina.