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From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I keep thinking of England and of “Little Lord Fauntleroy” and of how nice the English people must be. In England, you are a lady even if you are poor, so long as you speak softly and have pretty manners but if you yell and shout and scold, you are not a lady no matter what beautiful clothes you have. That is how the servants in Dorincourt Castle knew right away that Little Lord Fauntleroy’s mother was a lady.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
The fifth commandment says that, “Thou Shalt Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother.” Well, my father is very nice and everyone says that my mother was too, so I guess I can do that. It is easy to honor someone who is nice, but it is hard to honor a mother like Margaret Tadich has. Margaret’s face is always dirty and her dress is always dirty and Miss Cashen is always giving her a handkerchief to wipe her nose. They say that her mother gets drunk and so does her father, and when she comes home from school in the afternoon no one is home, and most of the time she has to go to bed with a piece of bread and butter because her mother doesn’t come home to cook dinner for her. I don’t think God wants you to honor a mother like that. He can’t want you to be stupid.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I asked Alma if I might stay in bed this morning because it was the Sabbath and God wanted everyone to rest. She said that she didn’t think I worked quite so hard all week that I needed a rest but that if I wanted to do it just to please God she supposed she would let me. So I woke up very early just like I always do but instead of taking a book to bed, I went down the back staircase to the yard and brought Brownie and Sherry up to my room. I put Brownie on the bed and Sherry on the soft chair next to it. Then we all went to sleep again. When Alma came in later and saw Brownie and Sherry she quickly pulled the drapes apart and curtains up and told me to get up and dress myself. She said that I know better than to have the animals up in my room. I told her that I was only obeying the fourth commandment. Didn’t God command that on the Sabbath everyone should rest, even the animals? Everyone in the house should rest and they can rest much better in my bed than they can in the yard. Then she said that Brownie and Sherry and I had rested enough and that we should get up, so we did.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Yesterday it rained so I couldn’t go to school. Aunt Tillie and Grandmother fuss so much about my getting rained on and I really love being out in the rain. They say that I must still keep my feet dry because of my tonsils. In the afternoon Alma went to school to find out what my lessons were so that she could help me at home over the weekend. She brought them all home written on a little piece of paper and I didn’t feel like doing them but Alma made me finish them.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Grandmother had company this afternoon. All her friends must be very stupid because they always ask me the same questions. Am I a good little girl? Do I like school? What do I want to be when I grow up? I always say yes, I am a good little girl and yes I like school and when I grow up I want to be a writer. Today I was tired of telling them that so I said that when I grow up I want to be married. They all laughed and said that was very smart of me and I said I thought so too, because all the married women I know can do just as they please. They don’t have to ask anyone. They go downtown and buy their own dresses and go into the kitchen and order their own dinners and the maids have to do everything they tell them to do. Their husbands also have to do everything they tell them, too.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I wish I could see England. Alma tells me that the grass is greener there than it is here and all the houses have hollyhocks around them and everyone has beautiful manners like she tries to teach me. She says that the English people speak a prettier English than the American ones do. That is why she is always reminding me to say “A” like “Ah-h-h” not like “A” in “cat” but then when I ask her why we don’t pronounce “cat” like “cot”, she told me not to be silly. But why don’t we?
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Alma is not American. She is English. England is a beautiful country. Peter Rabbit comes from England. Also Mother Goose. Mother Goose wrote all those beautiful poems that Alma reads to me when she wants me to go to sleep. Like “Hi Diddle Diddle the Cat and the Fiddle.” I love that one. I always think of one of Grandmother’s special blue and white soup plates running away with one of those silver spoons with ugly mermaids on them. Alma says that England had other people besides Mother Goose and Beatrix Potter, that’s the lady who wrote “Peter Rabbit” and who wrote other wonderful poems. There is the man who wrote that lovely poem that says the people who pray best are the ones that love best every single thing that God made, even tiny things like ants and maybe even fleas. Of course I suppose it must be hard to love a flea while it is biting you but then it can’t help being a flea. Grandfather says that nothing can help being what it is, that if our parents are fleas or mice or snakes we must also be fleas or mice or snakes and that your parents couldn’t help it either because of what their parents were.
The poem Hilda recalls is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The following stanza is at the end of Part VII:
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Every Sunday night Uncle Milton and Aunt Etta come for supper and afterwards Aunt Etta’s sister Rose comes with her husband and their little daughter Claire and they have dessert and coffee with us. Claire is younger than I am and she loves to play with all Grandmother’s ornaments. She just picks them out of the cabinet and loves to look at them one by one. She never breaks anything but Grandmother always thinks she is going to and so all the time Claire is here, Grandmother sits on the edge of her chair and gets her crochet cotton into knots. Of course she can’t tell Claire not to play with the things. That is because there is a wonderful American rule that Alma taught me. A house belongs to its guests. I guess someone told Claire that too.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
The fourth commandment is a nice sensible one. God says that, “We Must Always Remember the Sabbath Day and Keep It Holy,” but that doesn’t mean that we have to go to church or synagogue or anywhere. We may do anything we want except work. Also no one in our homes must work and even the animals shouldn’t work. Some people make the Sabbath day on Saturday and some on Sunday and this is sensible too because some work really has to be done every day.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I think if I had been Columbus I wouldn’t tell anyone about America. I’d have stayed here and had it all for myself. Maybe I’d have made myself King. That’s what I would have done if I were Columbus.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Tomorrow is Columbus Day, but it is a Saturday. We had to hear all about him today. He was a very bright man. He knew that the world was round and in those days everyone thought it was flat. He discovered America.
It was a long time ago, it was before they had big ships like they have now and so he had a hard time finding it. They almost didn’t get here at all and they weren’t quite sure where they were and there were lots of fights between him and all the sailors. Everyone was hungry and all the sailors had to eat were biscuits, something like dog biscuits and they had no fresh water. They were all sick, homesick, and scared. But Columbus wouldn’t let them go home and he sailed on and then one morning the man who sat in a basket high up on a sail saw land. Then a sea gull came. Then Columbus and all the sailors got down on their knees and thanked God for bringing them to the New World. Columbus said that it would belong to Spain because that is where they came from even though he was born in Italy. It was Queen Isabella of Spain who paid for their tickets and even bought the ships for them. I forgot to say that Columbus sailed in three ships. He was just in one of the ships of course. The other two followed him. His was called the Santa Maria. At first Queen Isabella was so happy about Columbus discovering America, she honored him but later she put him in prison…I forgot why.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Tante Esther came this afternoon and she told us about her new maid. She is always coming and telling us about a new maid. All her maids have something the matter with them, like cross eyes or dandruff or big hairs growing out of their faces; and they are not very bright. Grandmother says she has to take these ugly ones because she doesn’t pay enough money to get pretty ones, and besides she is not very nice to them. Grandmother says that she is crazy clean, and every single minute she has the maid doing something. She is either shaking out Tante Esther’s clothes from the back window, or polishing silver, or sweeping. Tante Esther can’t see these homely girls but everyone else can.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Business was good today. I found eighteen fleas on Brownie. I caught them by combing him with a fine metal comb and then I put the fleas in a glass of water. Grandfather can count them if he wants to, but I didn’t find any bugs on the roses.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
I handed in my composition yesterday and got it back today. Miss Cashen didn’t like this one either, although she marked it “Fair.” I guess it was too short. I just said…
A long time ago people had no pens and pencils to write with, so they used feathers from their geese. I hope they waited until their geese died before they pulled them out. They dried their letters by sprinkling sand on them, which they kept in salt shakers, because they didn’t have blotters.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
At the lunch table today, Grandfather said he had something very important to tell me. He said that I am getting to be a big girl and it is time I learned something about money, and the best way to learn about it, is to earn it. So he is going to give me a job. From now on, I shall get a penny for every flea I catch on Brownie, and every bug I find on Grandfather’s rose bushes. He said it is a fine job because I may work every day in the week and I may choose my own hours.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Today we learned the third commandment: “Thou Shalt Not take the Name of the Lord in Vain.” That means you shouldn’t say, “God Damn It!” when you are mad at someone, the way my Uncle Harold does.
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.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Miss Cashen didn’t like my composition. She said that when she asked us to write about something in the museum, she meant one of the exhibits. She said the little old man was not an exhibit. So at home, over the weekend I must write another composition about a mummy or a suit of armor or a stone bowl that the Indians used to eat their mush in, or an hour glass. Something important.
Unfortunately, Hilda’s creativity was not rewarded this time around.
The photos below may be some of what Hilda saw at the museum:
Photo courtesy of SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY, possibly from 1894
Photo courtesy of SAN FRANCISCO HISTORY CENTER, SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC LIBRARY, possibly from 1894
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Today Miss Cashen made each of us write a composition about the thing we liked best that we saw in the museum. The thing I liked best was the little old man who collected the umbrellas and cameras and canes at the entrance. So I wrote my composition about him. Of course I don’t know anything about him but I pretended that I did. I said that I liked him because he had a sweet smile and he looked like he was gentle. I then thought of the word “gentleman,” and perhaps all gentlemen are not gentle, especially Uncle Felix, but I didn’t write that. Then I said that he lives in a tiny white house with a dog and white cat and a little old wife with white hair, and that all the flowers in the garden were white, and all the dishes, and all the frosting on all the cakes were white, too. And I also said that sometimes a white cow came to visit them and she was always invited into the house to have tea with the white cat and the white dog.
From 8-year old Hilda’s diary:
Today instead of going to school, we went to a museum with Miss Cashen. The museum is in Golden Gate Park. Everything outside it was very beautiful. Everything inside was just old.
Photo courtesy OpenSFHistory
Hilda must have gone to the New Memorial Museum which ultimately became the de Young. Like Hilda, I went there on school field trips, but by then it was a different building. After damage from the 1989 earthquake, the current museum structure was built.