THE AMERICAN COUNTRY GIRL

The American Country Girl. An abundance of sunshine, fresh air, good water, and healthful exercise in the open permit wonderful young life to reach its highest development.

THE AMERICAN

COUNTRY GIRL

BY

MARTHA FOOTE CROW

AUTHOR OF

"ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING," "HARRIET BEECHER STOWE," ETC.

WITH FIFTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

TO THE

SEVEN MILLION COUNTRY LIFE GIRLS

OF AMERICA

WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY

MAY SEE THEIR GREAT PRIVILEGE

AND DO THEIR HONORABLE

PART IN THE NEW

COUNTRY LIFE ERA

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

NOTE

The author acknowledges with gratitude the kindness of her friends among the members of her fraternity, and among the graduates of Wellesley College, of Northwestern, Syracuse, and Chicago Universities, and of Grinnell College, who carefully found Country Girl correspondents for her in all parts of the country; and especially of Professor Martha Van Rensselaer of Cornell University who generously shared with her some of the results of a questionnaire on The Young Woman on the Farm, which was sent out by the Home Economics Department of that University.

It would be impossible to name here all the helpers that this book has the honor to claim; the many specialists who have been good enough to advise the author; the enthusiasts whose fire has sustained her courage; and above all the many friends who have entertained her in their country homes and talked over with her their problems. The author would, however, acknowledge her special indebtedness to the Honorable John T. Roberts, the well known lover and sympathetic critic of country life, who gave valuable time to reading her manuscript and made some vital suggestions; and to Miss Mary L. Read, head of the School of Mothercraft, who gave some of the chapters a studious criticism.

While acknowledging many sources of inspiration the author alone is responsible for the opinions expressed in the book, opinions sometimes maintained against valued authority. All quotations from Country Girl experiences are made with direct personal permission of the writers; the kindness of the girls, who for the sake of other girls have given these permissions, is here mentioned with special appreciation.

For illustrations the author is indebted to the Home Economics and other Departments of the Agricultural College at Cornell University and to the Home Economics Department of the School of Agriculture at Alfred, N. Y.; also to Mr. S. H. Dadisman of the Agricultural College at Ames, Iowa; to Mr. O. H. Benson of the United States Department of Agriculture; to Mr. A. A. Allen of the Cayuga Bird Club, and to Mr. James M. Pierce of the Iowa Homestead of Des Moines, Iowa. The list should also include Mr. R. M. Rosbrugh of Syracuse, N. Y., and Mrs. Mabel Stuart Lewis, efficient homesteader, of Fladmoe, South Dakota. Other names are mentioned in the text and need not be repeated here. To these and other helpers, great thanks are due.

This book has been written about the Country Girl and for the Country Girl; for her mother and father, and for everybody else as well; but especially for the Country Girl herself. It will reach its aim if some father says, "Why, here now, somebody has written a book about my little gal there. I should not have thought it was worth while to make a book about her. Well, now, perhaps she is of some account. Guess I'll give her a little more schooling; guess I'll let her go to that institute she was asking to go to; guess I'll let her have some music lessons, or buy her a piano, or send her to college." Or if some mother says wistfully, "My daughter is going to have a better chance than I had!" Or if the Country Girl herself should say, "I see my opportunity and I will arise and fulfil my mission."

The book will reach its aim, too, if another thing should happen. This is the first book about the Country Girl. There have been tons of paper devoted to the farmer; reams filled on the farm woman; not a line for the girl. May this first book be followed by many, correcting its misconceptions, rectifying its mistakes, directing its enthusiasms into the best channels for the welfare of the six and three-quarters millions of Country Girls of this land! By that time there will be seven millions—unless in fact these six millions shall have run away to build their homes and rear their children in the hot, stuffy, unsocialized atmosphere of the town, leaving the happy gardens without the joyous voices of children, the fields without sturdy boys to work them, the farm homes without capable young women to—shall I say, to man them? No, let us say to woman them, to lady them, to mother them, and so to make them centers of wholesome interesting life that, if the girls do their part, shall be the very heart and fiber of the nation.

The author is sorry that she cannot write to all the Country Girls who have written her either through the questionnaire or through other means of communication in the groups with which she has been so happily associated; but she wishes that every Country Girl who reads this book would write to her (using the address below) and tell her where she thinks the book has spoken truly and where mistakenly. She trusts the judgment of the Country Girls of America absolutely, if they can but be induced to speak in unison and after careful thought.

Martha Foote Crow.
Tuckahoe, New York City
August, 1915.

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE?

Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth.

Frances E. Willard.
O Woman, what is the thing you do, and what is the thing you cry?
Is your house not warm and enclosed from harm, that you thrust the curtain by?
And have we not toiled to build for you a peace from the winds outside,
That you seek to know how the battles go and ride where the fighters ride?
You have taken my spindle away from me, you have taken away my loom;
You bid me sit in the dust of it, at peace without cloth or broom;
You have shut me still with a sleepy will, with nor evil nor good to do,
While our house the World that we keep for God should be garnished and swept anew.
The evil things that have waxed and grown while I sat with my white hands still,
They have meshed our world till they twined and curled through my verywindow sill;
Shall I sit and smile at my ease the while that my house is wrongly kept?
It is mine to see that the house of me is straightened and cleansed and swept!
Margaret Widdemer.

CHAPTER I

THE COUNTRY GIRL—WHERE IS SHE?

The clarion of the country life movement has by this time been blown with such loudness and insistence that no hearing ear in our land can have escaped its announcement. The distant echoes of brutal warfare have not drowned it: above all possible rude and cruel sounds this peaceful piping still makes itself heard.

It has reached the ears of the farmer and has stirred his mind and heart to look his problems in the face, to realize their gigantic implications, and to shoulder the responsibility of their solution. It has penetrated to the thoughts of teachers and educators everywhere and awakened them to the necessities of the minute, so that they have declared that the countryside must have educational schemes adapted to the needs of the countryside people, and that they must have teachers whose heads are not in the clouds. It has aroused easy-going preachers in the midst of their comfortable dreams and has caused here and there one among them to bestir himself and to make hitherto unheard-of claims as to what the church might do—if it would—for the betterment of country life.

And all of these have given hints to philanthropists and reformers, and these to organizations and societies; these again have suggested theories and projects to legislators, senators, and presidents; the snowball has been rolled larger and larger; commissions have sat, investigations have been made, documents have been attested, reports handed in, bills drafted and, what is better, passed by courageous legislation; so that now great schemes are being not only dreamed of but put into actual fulfilment. Moreover, lecturers have talked and writers have issued bulletins and books, until there has accumulated a library of vast proportions on the many phases of duty, activity, and outlook that may be included under the title, "A Country Life Movement."

In all this stirring field of new interest, the farmer and his business hold the center of attention. Beside him, however, stands a dim little figure hitherto kept much in the background, the farmer's wife, who at last seems to be on the point of finding a voice also; for a chapter is now assigned to her in every book on rural conditions and a little corner under a scroll work design is given to her tatting and her chickens in the weekly farm paper. Cuddled about her are the children, and they, the little farm boys and girls, have now a book that has been written just about them alone—their psychology and their needs. Also, the tall strong youth, her grown-up son, has his own paper as an acknowledged citizen of the rural commonwealth. But where is the tall young daughter, and where are the papers for her and the books about her needs? It seems that she has not as yet found a voice. She has failed to impress the makers of books as a subject for description and investigation. In the nation-wide effort to find a solution to the great rural problems, the farmer is working heroically; the son is putting his shoulder to the wheel; the wife and mother is in sympathy with their efforts. Is the daughter not doing her share? Where is the Country Girl and what is happening in her department?

It is easier on the whole to discover the rural young man than to find the typical Country Girl. Since the days of Mother Eve the woman young and old has been adapting herself and readapting herself, until, after all these centuries of constant practise, she has become a past master in the art of adaptation. Like the cat in the story of Alice, she disappears in the intricacy of the wilderness about her and nothing remains of her but a smile.

There are some perfectly sound reasons why American country girls as a class cannot be distinguished from other girls. Chief among these is the fact that no group of people in this country is to be distinguished as a class from any other group. It is one of the charms of life in this country that you never can place anybody. No one can distinguish between a shop girl and a lady of fashion; nor is any school teacher known by her poise, primness, or imperative gesture. The fashion paper, penetrating to the remotest dug-out, and the railway engine indulging us in our national passion for travel see to these things. Moreover, the pioneering period is still with us and the western nephews must visit the cousins in the old home in New Hampshire, while the aunts and uncles left behind must go out to see the new Nebraska or Wyoming lands on which the young folks have settled. We do not stay still long enough anywhere in the republic for a class of any sort to harden into recognizable form.

New inhabitants may come here already hardened into the mold of some class; but they or their children usually soften soon into the quicksilver-like consistency of their surroundings.

There is also no subdividing of notions on the basis of residence, whether as townsman or as rural citizen. The wind bloweth where it listeth in this land. It whispers its free secrets into the ears of the city dweller in the flat and of the rural worker of the cornfield or the vine-screened kitchen. The rain also falls on the just and the unjust whether suburbanated or countrified. There is no rural mind in America. There has indeed been a great deal of pother of late over the virtue and temper of "rural-minded people." This debate has been conscientiously made in the effort to discern reasons why commissions should sit on a rural problem. Reasons enough are discernible why commissions should sit, but they lie rather in the unrural mind of the rural people, as the words are generally understood, than in some supposed qualities imposed or produced in the life of sun and rain, in that vocation that is nearest to the creative activities of the Divine.

And if there is no rural mind, there is no distinctive rural personality. If the man that ought to exemplify it is found walking up Fifth Avenue or on Halstead Street or along El Camino Real, he cannot be discovered as a farmer. He may be discovered as an ignorant person, or he may be found to be a college-bred man; but in neither case would the fact be logically inclusive or uninclusive of his function as farmer.

The same is almost as exactly true for his wife and his daughter. If one should ask in any group of average people whether the farmer's daughter as they have known her is a poor little undeveloped child, silent and shy, or a hearty buxom lass, healthy and strong and up to date, some in the group would say the latter and some the former. Both varieties exist and can by searching be found along the countryside. But it is nothing essentially rural that has developed either the one set of characteristics or the other. To be convinced of this, one who knows this country well has but to read a book like "Folk of the Furrow," by Christopher Holdenby, a picture of rural life in England. In such a book as that one realizes the full meaning of the phrase, "the rural mind," and one sees how far the men and women that live on the farms in the United States have yet to go, how much they will have to coagulate, how many centuries they will have to sit still in their places with wax in their ears and weights on their eyelids, before they will have acquired psychological features such as Mr. Holdenby gives to the folk of the English furrow.

A traveler in the Old World frequently sees illustrations of this. For instance, in passing through some European picture gallery, he may meet a woman of extraordinary strength and beauty, dressed in a style representing the rural life in that vicinity. She will wear the peasant skirt and bodice, and will be without gloves or hat. A second look will reveal that the skirt is made of satin so stiff that it could stand alone; the velvet bodice will be covered with rich embroidery; and heavy chains of silver of quaint workmanship will be suspended around the neck.

On inquiry one may learn that this stately woman was of what would be called in this country a farmer family, that had now become very wealthy; that she did not consider herself above her "class"—so they would describe it—no, that she gloried in it instead. It was from preference only that she dressed in the fashion of that "class."

Now, whether desirable or not, such a thing as this would never be seen in America. No woman (unless it were a deaconess or a Salvation Army lassie or a nun) would pass through the general crowd showing her rank or profession in life by her style of dress. And that is how it happens that neither by hat nor by hatlessness would the country woman here make known her pride in the possession of acres or in her relation to that profession that forms the real basis of national prosperity. Hence no country girl counts such a pride among her inheritances. Therefore if it is not easy to find and understand the country girl as a type, it is not because she is consciously or unconsciously hiding herself away from us; she is not even sufficiently conscious of herself as a member of a social group to pose in the attitude of an interesting mystery. She is just a human being happening to live in the country (not always finding it the best place for her proper welfare), just a single one in the great shifting mass.

Although it may be difficult to find what we may think are typical examples of the Country Girl as a social group, yet certain it is that she exists. Of young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine, there are in the United States six and a half million (6,694,184, to be exact) who reside in the open country or in small villages. This we are assured is so by the latest Census Report.

By starting a little further down in the scale of girlhood and advancing a trifle further into maturity this number could be doubled. It would be quite justifiable to do this, because some farmers' daughters become responsible for a considerable amount of labor value well before the age of fifteen; and on the other hand the energy of these young rural women is abundantly extended beyond the gateway of womanhood, far indeed into the period that used to be called old-maidism, but which is to be so designated no more; the breezy, executive, free-handed period when the country girl is of greatest use as a labor unit and gives herself without stint (and often without pay) to the welfare of the whole farmstead. The American Country Girl is not by any means behind her city sister in her ability to make the bounds of her youth elastic, though the girl on the farm may go at it in a somewhat different way. Then, perhaps, too, the word "youth" may, alas! have another connotation in the mind of one from what it has in the dreams of the other.

If we should, however, thus enlarge the scope of our inquiry, we should increase but not clarify our problems. Moreover it is the Country Girl that interests us, the promise and hope of her dawn, the delicate swiftly changing years of her growth, the miracle of her blossoming. There is something about the kaleidoscope of her moods and the inconsistencies of her biography that fascinates us. The moment when she awakes, when the sparkle begins to show in her eyes, when we know that a conception of her mission and of her supreme value to life is beginning to glow before her imagination—that is the crisis to work for and to be happy over when it comes. As for us, we ask no greater happiness than once or twice to catch a glimpse of that.

That great host of six million country girls is scattered far and wide; they are everywhere present. A certain number of millions of them are working industriously in myriads of unabandoned farms all over the Appalachian plateau, and on the wide prairies to the Rockies, and beyond. In thousands of farmsteads they are helping their mothers wash dishes three times a day three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, not counting the steps as they go back and forth between dining-room and kitchen. They are carrying heavy pails of spring water into the house and throwing out big dishpanfuls of waste water, regardless of the strain in the small of the back. They are picking berries and canning them for the home table in the winter; they are raising tomatoes and canning them for the market; they are managing the younger children; they are baking and sewing and reading and singing; they are caring for chickens and for bees and for orphan lambs; they ride the rake and the disc-plow and sometimes join the round-up on the range. Moreover they go to church and they go to town and they look forward to an ideal future just as other girls do. The Country Girl is a human being also.

It has been intimated that young women living on remote secluded farms have not, with all their singing, been always able to dispel the monotony of a thousand inevitable dishwashings a year; they are said nowadays to have opened their ear to the lure of the town and to have started out, keeping step with their brothers, to join what some one has called, "the funeral procession of the nation" cityward. If we could, in fact, get them to confide in us, we should find that they have longings and aspirations, many of which are unsatisfied; and that is the reason why it seems to be high time for their voice to be heard.

Some of the younger farm women are showing themselves equal to the larger burdens in the business of agriculture. They are running their own farms in Michigan and their own automobiles in Kansas. They are taking up claims. They are developing them and proving up in the Dakotas and through Montana and Wyoming. From four to six in the morning they till an acre; then they ride twenty miles to the school and teach from nine to four; after that they ride back and work in their cornfields till the stars twinkle out. They stay alone in their shack and are happy and fearless and safe.

Moreover some thousands of the girls are laboriously teaching schools in thousands of one-room schoolhouses, where they provide almost one hundred per cent. of the common instruction for fifty per cent. of the population.

Besides this, there is no one of all the gainful occupations in which young women of this country engage which has not drawn upon the reservoir of country strength for supplies. Among those women blacksmiths and engineers, those clerks, secretaries, librarians and administrators, those lawyers, doctors, professors, writers, those nurses, settlement workers, investigators and other servants of the people in widely diverse fields, there are many whose clearness of eye and reserve of force have been developed in the wholesome conditions of the open country. The Country Girl has no reason to be ashamed of the part she has borne in the non-rural world. It has been said that about eighty per cent. of the names found in "Who's Who in America" represent an upbringing in the rural atmosphere. The proportion of women in this number or the special proportion of grown-up farm girls to be found among those women cannot be stated; but the number must be large enough to justify a belief that to spend a childhood in the open country or in the rural village will not, in the case of women any more than in the case of men, form an impassable barrier to eminence.

From this great rural reserve of initiating force, sane judgment, and spiritual drive have come, in fact, some of the most valued names in philanthropy and literature. Among them we find the leader of a great reform, Frances Willard; the inaugurator of a world-wide work of mercy, Clara Barton; the president of a great college, Alice E. Freeman; the wise helper of all who suffer under unjust conditions in city life, Jane Addams; and the writer of a book that has had a national and world-wide influence, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

It heartens us up a bit to name over examples like these. They give us a vista and a hope. But now and then there is a Country Girl who would rather have, say, a better pair of stilts over the morass or a stronger rope thrown to her across the quicksand, than a volume of "Who's Who" tossed carelessly to her in her difficulties. For all the Country Girls on their farms do not sing at their work. They are not idle, heaven knows!—but their work does not invariably inspire the appreciation it deserves.

CHAPTER II

THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM

New times demand new measures and new men;
The world advances and in time outgrows
The laws that in our fathers' day were best;
And, doubtless, after us some purer scheme
Will be shaped out by wiser men than we,
Made wiser by the steady growth of truth.
Lowell.

CHAPTER II

THE HEART OF THE PROBLEM

The reason why the American people care so much for the ideals that are presented to us in the Country Life Movement is that there is something very deep-seated and permanent within us to which these motives can appeal. We are a country-life people. The bogy of the overshadowing city, threatening to spread and spread until, like a great octopus, it should suck all the sweet fields into its tentacles and cover the green areas with a compact blackness, has given us a definite fright. The result of our terror is the "Country Life Movement." It is not that we were actually approaching an imagined danger-point; it was only that a vision of life constantly fed and inspired by the pure unadulterated influences of the country was before the eyes of a country-bred people, and was of so great preciousness that we must guard it at the first hint of peril. There are indeed grave dangers threatening some fundamental interests in the agricultural realm; to these the nation is now well awake. The republic has many problems but on the whole it is prospering, and perhaps one reason why this is so lies in the fact that the profession of agriculture is still the backbone of our national life.

The so-called Country Life Movement, then, is not a sudden onslaught upon our consciousness by an alien influence, as if we were fish suddenly commanded to go and live on the land. It is more as if a band of mountaineers with lungs adjusted to a height of several thousand feet, had been trying to breathe the air in a close and stuffy valley far below their proper levels, but who had now returned to their native height and were feeling the glow and triumph of their original energy; or who perhaps, being frightened lest they should be imprisoned in that low valley, were making frantic efforts to escape this doom and to reach their mountain homes where they could breathe freely and grow normally again. The Country Life Movement is not the despairing gasp of expiring effeteness; it is an exclamation of robust joy in the possession of a life healthily adapted to our needs.

At present there are well-nigh six million farmsteads in this country. They form what we may untechnically call the agricultural group, and represent roughly, but of course vitally, the great business of farming. In our consideration we have to include also the small rural villages, because the United States Census Reports include under the word "rural" both people living in the open country and those living in villages up to twenty-five hundred inhabitants in size.

In the agricultural group the unit is the farmstead. By that term is meant the whole complex organization of the farm, including the land and its products, the stock, the barns and the sheds, the whole family together with whatever houses it, the corps of workers, farmer, farmer's wife, sons, daughters, maiden aunts, working people unhired and hired—in fact, everything "animal, vegetable or mineral," as the children say when they play "Forty Questions," that ministers in any way to the success of the farm as a business and to its ultimate object, the happiness of the family living thereon. So when we say "farmstead" we mean not only fodder for beasts but also food for the human beings; but inasmuch as the human being is soul-endowed and has imperative appetites in the æsthetic and spiritual realm as well as in the physical, the farmstead covers the matter of the piano as well as of the hoe. A wealthy farmstead is indeed one that has cattle upon many hills, or that sends many carloads of milk to the city; but it can scarcely be called a wholly prosperous farmstead unless it has an unrestricted view of the scenery from its living-room windows, a public reading room within reach of its buggy's wheels—that means, say, within twelve or fifteen miles at most—or of its automobile—which may mean within forty or one hundred miles according to the roads and the car; and, we may add, unless it takes advantage of this and other cultural privileges.

It may be said that the ultimate end of the whole farm business is the happiness of the family; yet the minds of many do not travel to the ultimate—they pause at some one of the possible stopping places along the way and fashion that subsidiary idea into the fiction of an ultimate end. For instance, one may make the fattening of stock or the purchase of a certain additional strip of land into an ultimate end, and work for that, sacrificing much that is of immediate happiness value, or perhaps even of supreme happiness value, to gain that minor object. Meantime the real end, the one that if we should penetrate to the heart of our ideals, we should find seated in the most sacred place: namely, the welfare and happiness of the family group for which we live and labor, has been neglected, and nearer, more direct means to attain it have been overlooked.

This, then, is the heart of the matter. The farmstead is an intricate organism with many parts working wonderfully together. The object, the reason for the existence of every item and strain of it and for the thing as a whole, is that there should be at the center of it a radiant core of joy in which every human member of the little cosmos may have a share and so reflect back to the others a still greater brightness. In this farmstead world, each individual member must therefore be made happy. A tricky word—that word "happiness!" Perhaps it cannot be defined, but Americans are entitled to pursue it, whatever it may mean!

The wise ones, however, say that the one condition that can and will set alight a vigorous flame of happiness at the heart of any human farmstead is that there should be found there the opportunity for growth for every individual in the circle, for the development of his or her latent powers, so that each life may find that whatever it was intended to be, it has been fully able to become; that none of its God-given abilities have gone to waste for want of notice, furtherance, food, or inspiration. It would be a pity to find that there was one social structure among the devices of our high civilization that was stubbornly inhospitable to the entrance of that messenger, "Growth," who precedes and announces the heavenly visitant, "Happiness." The farmstead must not be accused of being such a structure as that unless it is absolutely necessary.

To what extent, then, does the farmstead offer opportunity for such growth? Is it too much to ask that the ultimate joy of living, the joy of growth, should be brought very near to the eyes of the people living on the farmsteads, that their imaginations should be touched even more keenly than they now are to a consciousness of the real possibilities in their environment? What can we do to create an atmosphere that will give its own enthusiasm to the people, that will bind each member of the farmstead indissolubly to the place; one in which there shall be so swift a certainty that it will seem like magic; that must so charm the mind and the heart of each one that the tie will hold against any kind of onslaught?

But the claim is being made in some quarters that the countryside home does not live up to its possibilities in this respect, and if not in this respect then the country life movement has a real pang behind it as well as an uprising of renewed life. If the father in the home, who is the farmer and head of the homestead, does not find happiness according to his needs, it may from all the signs be concluded that the government and the universities and the newspapers and the legislators are busying themselves to the greatest possible extent to relieve his disabilities; he may be left in their care for the present. Of the farmer's wife, who is the head of the home and the partner with her husband in the farm business, the government has lately in a group of letters addressed to fifty-five thousand farm-woman correspondents, asked the question, What do you wish to have done that your life may be more filled with content and that your disabilities may be relieved? It is safe to presume that the longings of their hearts will be by some means satisfied in longer or shorter meter. The sons are sharing the fortunes of the fathers, but if they are not, numbers of them may go out from the home valley and easily seek what they believe will be a better fortune along the outer avenues of a man's activities. And the daughter? While that ship comes slowly in that is to bring something comforting to her mother, while her father is giving the farm the benefit of his fast accumulating scientific information and lessening the daily labor by up-to-date machinery, what is happening to her? Is she having her share of content? Has she the chance to grow and fill full the possible round of her own personal development? Is the Country Girl happy on the farm? Or is she in her heart dissatisfied and glowering? Is she suppressed and sodden in mood? Is her face expressionless and too old for her years? Is she round-shouldered and heavy of step? Is she listless and suspicious and sensitive?

The Country Girl is the life of the home. She is a companion for the parents and a playmate for the little brothers and sisters.

Or is she full of spirit and enthusiasm, a perfect dynamo of energy? Is she the life of the home, with a word and a joke for everybody and is she a perfect mischief among the other children? Is her face full of expression, with smiles and dimples all the time? Is she full of love and affection toward each member of the family, and endless in her devices for their comfort and entertainment? Is she a veritable steam engine to get the work done and equally a master hand at all kinds of games and plays, able to get up something in no time and carry out any kind of a scheme with nothing to do with? Does she sleep the very sleep of the dead the whole night long, and is she all day the widest awake being that can be found for miles around? Has she an appetite to startle one fully three times a day and even more often, if something good to eat is being made? In fine, is she receiving her share of possible growth? Is she having her chance to show all that she is able to become? And thus is she being happy? And also thus is she making the rest of the circle in the home that is at the center of the farmstead, happier than it could ever have been if she had not been there and had not been the fully developed girl that she is?

This is the question that seems most important at just this time. This is the problem on which light must be thrown.

It seems to be an important question for several reasons. It is said that the young men are showing their dissatisfaction with farm life by going away in large numbers to find occupation in the city; that the best and most energetic of the young men, those who would have been leaders for betterment in the general countryside, are found among those who desert the countryside, and that thus the farm community is depleted and deprived of good elements that it cannot well spare. The wind of destiny for woman that has swept through the country and the world during the last two decades or so, has penetrated the valleys where in seclusion the Country Girls have grown up, and has now whispered inspiration and courage into their ears, so that if they are dissatisfied with the conditions of their lives they will have the daring to go forth also, following their brothers, and to take up some industrial fortune in the city whither the bright star of independence beckons them. They are doing this already; and the news of it should make thoughtful people bestir themselves. There seems to be a great problem here, and the Country Girl seems to be at the heart of it. For if the rural question is the central question of the world, and if the social problem is the heart of the rural problem, and if the failure of the daughter's joy and usefulness threatens the farmstead,—then once more in the history of the world has the hour struck for woman; then does the welfare of the world depend upon her as much as did the life of the bleak New England shore depend on the health and survival of the Pilgrim Mothers?

Of course no one would wish to claim that the young woman in the farmstead is of more importance than other members of the home; but as a chain will break if one link fails, so the farmstead will be ruined if it lacks the cooperation of the daughter. She has, at least, a function all her own; and the happiness that comes through normal growth must be hers in order that she may fulfil her mission. The farmstead girl must take her place in the farmstead or the farmstead unit will lack one of its component parts and fall to pieces. It is her patriotic duty; it is her home and family duty; and it is her greatest happiness. The young woman on the farm must grow up with the idea that she is essential to the progress of country life and therefore of the national life, and that a career is before her just as much as if she were aiming to be an artist or a writer or a missionary. This purpose makes her life worth while. She must conserve her health for this; she must develop her powers for this; she must train herself heroically for this.

We are, then, face to face with the question, so important to us at the present moment, whether the daughter in the farmstead family is having her own full meed of happiness in her farm home or not. Has she the opportunity that is her right to grow and develop all her latent powers and to become the person that by all the gifts of nature she is capable of becoming?

CHAPTER III

IS THE COUNTRY GIRL HAPPY ON THE FARM?

Let the mighty and great
Roll in splendor and state!
I envy them not, I declare it.
I eat my own lamb,
My own chicken and ham,
I shear my own sheep and I wear it.
I have lawns, I have bowers,
I have fruits, I have flowers.
My lark is my morning's charmer;
So you jolly dogs now
Here's God bless the plow—
Long life and content to the farmer.
Inscription on an old English pitcher.

CHAPTER III

IS THE COUNTRY GIRL HAPPY ON THE FARM?

The young women who read this book will surely believe that no mere curiosity inspires the question at the head of this chapter, but a fully fixed idea that much depends on the answer. If it is not to be possible for the young women to be made happy in the rural environment, they surely are going to turn in great numbers and follow the beckoning finger of industries and engagements townward. And if multitudes of them do this, it will be increasingly difficult to keep that composite thing, the farmstead, in perfect balance; and in that balance the daughters have every year a more important part. Their share, in fact, is constantly growing more vital, more indispensable to the welfare of the whole.

There is also an even more important consideration. It is this. The daughters in the homes of to-day are the home-makers of to-morrow; if they are estranged irrecoverably from the countryside, what is to become of the countryside in the days that are to come? Can we entertain the hope that the city cousins will come to the rescue? Can we reply upon the inrush of new families from across the seas to enter our widespread fields and valleys and support for us the burden of scientific housekeeping, and high-minded home making, and modern education in the spirit of American institutions?

These are some of the thoughts and some of the fears that students of the situation entertain. The result is that a strong interest is felt to know if possible exactly how the country girl herself does feel about her life on the farm, whether she is dissatisfied with the conditions that surround her, whether she suffers from a deep-seated sense of neglect and suppression, and whether she is attentive to some distant call of the metropolitan lure.

Many conversations and a wide and representative correspondence leave the impression upon the author that the Country Girls of America, however far apart in geography and condition, are alike in one characteristic—the sincerity and soberness of their testimony. The young woman on the American farm is thoughtful, well balanced, dignified. She takes herself seriously, and she is developing powers that promise well for the future of American life.

The first unthinking impulse of many country girls is their love for their country homes. Some are optimistic enough to claim that the farmer's family can enjoy all the advantages of village or city life without any of the disadvantages, and with the added enjoyment of the country itself. Now that books, pictures, and music are so easily accessible to the farm, now that the telephone puts one into communication with friends in city or country, and modern traveling conveniences make it possible to secure such urban benefits as lectures, church, lodge, post office, etc., they feel that they have all grievances done away with. Girls in thickly-populated New York and in wide-awake, modern Idaho give the same testimony. There is a large group who will even exclaim as one Missouri girl did that she never had had a single reason for wishing to leave the farm; that she knew of no other place which offered so much help in physical, mental, and spiritual growth and development.

A young woman with an ear to economic values suggests that on the farm a great part of the food can be produced at home and can thus be kept free from adulteration. This is not by any means a minor consideration. Another who perhaps has at some time known stringency in the city and can look at the problem from another angle, thinks that in the country it is rather a relief not to have to count the cost of each separate meal.

The opportunities on the farm sometimes appeal to the fun loving propensities of the young girl. One has, or nearly always can have, they say, space for games, such as tennis, basket ball, etc. Many think that there is more real fun in the distinctive exercises of the farm than in those of the town; for there they have nutting, riding down hill, going berrying, riding on loads of hay;—all these are thoroughly appreciated.

In the varied business of the farmstead the daughter may see her love of animals gratified. On the big Iowa farm where one Country Girl lives the farm stock is to her the chief attraction. They make pets of nearly all their creatures, and she herself assigns the fanciful and literary pet names.

Some times the more mature country girl has reached the height where she finds the good of country life to consist in its liberty, its leisure, its varied interests, its fresh air and nearness to nature, and its distance from the pettiness of the towns people and their limited outlook. On the farm time may be devoted to the really big things of life without petty distractions. One gains there a wholesome, sane view of life. There may be plenty to do on the farm but what you do is of consequence.

The Country Girl and Her Pets. "The quietness of the country permits a greater spiritual and mental growth, with its abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets."

Some of the more spiritual aspects are gathered together in this transcript of a Country Girl's thoughts and dreams. In trying to describe the charm that the country has for her, she mentions "the quietness and peace which permit of one's greater spiritual and mental growth, the abundance of life, plant and animal, which challenges the mind to discover its secrets; the rocks and streams which call out to one for study and discovery, the beauties of the sunrise, the clouds, the sunset, the moonlight, and the far off stars,—these call to our spirits to penetrate their mystery and lift up our souls to those levels above the commonplace where we commune with the Maker; the hills and the wide expanses make us reverent and teach us to walk humbly and patiently; the clean sweet air gives us health and strength of body and soul; and the freedom from restraint by formalities and conventionalities permits the development of the person in a sane and natural way."

Another thoughtful mind writes this: "Farming is creative; being experimental, it is interesting. On the farm both body and mind are exercised, therefore both are kept nearer a normal level. We have fresher, purer food and air; freedom from foolish forms and ceremony. We are nearer to God."

An aspect that many country girls have keenly felt is shown in this passage from the letter of a loyal girl of the countryside: "I fail to find the hardships of farm life, and it always makes me indignant to hear about them. Save as all life has its hardships, these special hardships are a bugaboo that does not exist. A few weeks ago I was hostess to fourteen of the girls from a large drygoods store in the city. I was grieved to see what undersized, ill-nourished little people they were. They ranged in age from sixteen to twenty, and every one was prepared to despise the country and to look upon it with contempt and the people with pity because they do not live in the city. Their prevailing idea seemed to be that they had come to another race of people whom they regarded with a tolerant pity and contempt. I heard them telling my cousins, honest manly fellows, how very different they were from boys in the city. Ah me! the simplest things about nature which they did not know would fill many a book."

This delightfully peppery communication may be followed by one that gives that feeling of joyousness that we believe should always be found in real country life, and at the end strikes clearly the most important note of all: "The attractiveness of farm life lies in as many, diverse, and wonderful things as the breadth of the individual girl's mind can comprehend and enjoy. To some the sense of freedom in country life is a large means of happiness. The feeling of exultation in the far sweep of vision, the glorious sunsets, and the movements of the clouds in the wind and the coming storm. Then there is the pleasure in seeing and helping things grow, in the frolic of the lambs in the spring, of the colts at play, and in the young plants sprouting and growing in the summer showers and sunshine; especially if you have pulled the weeds and hoed about them yourself. Frequent outings to the lake or river for an afternoon or evening holiday with bathing and canoeing in the afternoon and a bonfire in the evening with a group of friends to toast marshmallows or roast corn, and later with stories and songs, add much to the pleasure of farm life. Then there is the quiet and peace of the country where one may be alone at times and think. In the country there is a more compact home life than anywhere else, for each member of the family is working together for the home." This most important point might receive further emphasis.

The young women in our farm homes, are, with true American spirit, appreciating the possible play in rural life of freedom and independence. Young women of the rural communities seem to be at one with the time spirit of the whole country. Nothing has set them askew, not even a world-wide women's movement! It delights them that country life fosters individuality; but they absolutely identify themselves with the welfare of the farmstead as a whole. The idea that their good could be separated from the good of the family and business group in which their life is embedded, does not seem to influence the minds of our country girls, north, south, east, or west. And they have their far thoughts; they look ahead and see that life on the farm furthers the unity of the family; that it is the best place to rear children; that family life and affection are more successfully fostered in a country town than in a city flat, hotel or mansion. They find that simplicity of living is easier to attain in the farm home and they believe that this is favorable to the welfare of the family. Moreover, the coordinating spirit of the age has touched the minds of some. They see now that the farmstead is closely knit up with the larger unit of the farm community. They find along the countryside greater friendliness among neighbors than is found in the crowded city; they realize that the farmer's family can set its own standards without losing social recognition; and they prize the informality of social intercourse which is found in the rural world.

These are some of the things that the young woman in the rural realm will set down in her brief for country life. Her voice is an even-tempered voice; there is self-control in it and there is a dynamic element behind it that will compel a hearing. Talking with many Country Girls and reading long letters from them, one gains an impression that, like the composite photograph, reveals a country girl personality whose sanity and thoughtfulness win our respect, and whose serious facing of the facts bodes ill for such country life leaders as may in the future neglect the resources to be found in the sagacity, alertness, and powers of execution stored up in the young womanhood of our rural life.

CHAPTER IV

A CALENDAR OF DAYS

A country life is sweet!
In moderate cold and heat,
To walk in the air how pleasant and fair!
In every field of wheat,
The fairest of flowers adorning the bowers
And every meadow's brow;
So that I say, no courtier may
Compare with them who clothe in gray,
And follow the useful plow.
They rise with the morning lark,
And labor till almost dark;
Then, folding their sheep, they hasten to sleep,
While every pleasant park
Next morning is ringing with birds that are singing
On each green, tender bough.
With what content and merriment
Their days are spent, whose minds are bent
To follow the useful plow.
Anon.

CHAPTER IV

A CALENDAR OF DAYS

The wisest find life a difficult thing to classify; therefore young girls must not be blamed if they do not critically analyze the causes and the effects that appear in their personal environment. When asked, however, to give pictures of their daily experiences they do not fail us. Such glimpses of the real life of some Country Girls in their farm homes will be afforded by the partial recitals given in this chapter. To other Country Girls or to those to whom the welfare of the country girl is dear, or even to those urbanized city residents who consider the dwellers in the open country as a sort of alien race whose ways must be made a matter of study before they can be comprehended—these and perhaps others will surely be interested in these fresh and vivid accounts of the everyday doings in the farm homes of our country.

A fortunate country girl when asked to write a description of a representative working day of her life, sends the following joyous account. She is fifteen years old. Her life is under the protection of highly educated parents and the safeguards of right home training, taste and refinement. They come from magnificent stock and work a farm of medium size in the Northwest. She said:

"I get up at about half-past six in the morning, and have breakfast at seven. Then I help Mother what I can before I start for school. Mamma puts up my luncheon while I get ready. About a quarter past eight I start on my two mile walk to school. For about three quarters of a mile I follow the road, then I turn off into woods. By following a half-beaten trail for a ways, I come to a bridge made of wire. The sides and bottom are of wire; on the bottom are laid rows of planks with cross pieces to keep them where they belong. The bridge sways when you walk on it and sometimes it sags quite a little. Across the river I go through more woods. The schoolhouse is set on the top of a little hill. There are about twenty pupils in the school. At recess and noon we often play baseball. We have a fine teeter and swing. At noons all of the girls and sometimes the boys take their dinners and go out and find some pretty spot in the woods to eat. In the spring-time we often go flower hunting. I never get home in the afternoon until about half past four. After school I play, sew, or help in the garden till supper time. After supper I do the supper dishes, then we all have a nice time sewing, reading, or playing games around the fireplace."

A rest-breathing idyl like this shows that it is possible for bits of heaven to appear here upon earth now and then! The picture is made still more vivid by this little note:

"Several times we took lunch to an unworked mine near by and enjoyed the beautiful view and amused ourselves by picking gold out of the crevices in the rocks." The final touch of romantic beauty!

A roseate story like this should be followed, for contrast's sake, by one picturing the harder side. The following, written by a girl of sixteen, a description of a day in haying time, shows how a blithesome spirit can make work light and joyous:

"Haying time is a very busy season for all on the farm. At 5.30 o'clock Mother comes to our room, saying, 'It is going to be a good hay day, girlies. You must get up now; the men are nearly through milking.' She is forced to call several times, but finally we are up and dressed; we help finish getting breakfast, feed the chickens, and drive the cows to pasture. After breakfast my sister and I take the milk to the milkman who carries it to the milk station. Father hitches our horse and loads the milk for us, and then hurries away to begin his mowing so that the hay will have time to be well cured in the afternoon. We drive a half mile to the milk stand where our milk is unloaded by the milkman; exchange good-mornings with him and perhaps with a neighbor or two, and drive back home. We take care of our horse and wagon and then help with the morning housework. About half-past eight my sister and I start out after huckleberries in a near-by field. It is a beautiful morning and we enjoy the walk. We pick enough berries for a pie and for supper that evening and a few more. But we hurry back in order to have a little rest before half-past ten, when I must start raking. At half-past ten, then, I hitch my horse to the rake and ride off to the lot to work. I rake until dinner time and have perhaps a third of the raking done. I unharness my horse, water him, and put him in the barn. I go to dinner with an enormous appetite and a feeling of anticipation, both of which are soon appeased.

"Soon after dinner I begin raking again and rake until six o'clock. Father and the hired man draw in six large loads of hay. The haying for the day is done and it is pleasant to lie in the hammock and read a paper or book while the men finish unloading their last load. But before I enjoy this I must take care of my horse and carry him a drink of water from the well. After supper my sister and I help with the dishes and then run off to play in the swing while the men finish milking. When the milking is done we take the cows and the horse to pasture. Then we feed the calf, Claire by name, who is a very dear little creature and always greets us with great joy when she sees us coming. We shut up the chickens also. Then there is about a half-hour or more left for play, and we have a good time, forgetting that we ever worked.

"All our days are not so busy as this one; and when the haying and summer sewing are done, we have a chance for good times. Our haying was done this summer in eight days or perhaps less. At quarter of nine we go to bed. I read a chapter or two in some book I am reading, but by ten o'clock we are both asleep with the starlight and the moonlight shining in on us through the open screen."

If our sixteen-year-old girls can be completely satisfied to have but half an hour a day for recreation and to spend all the rest in unintermittent and heavy toil, and then can come out of it not only with unbroken courage but also with buoyancy and a poetic mood, then our respect for the country girl's character and nerve ought to be enhanced. This one ends her story thus:

"Indeed my sister and I love the farm very much and have no desire to leave it. We often declare that we would not live in the city for anything."

Perhaps the above letter will be recognized in some mysterious way as belonging to one of the Middle States; the following delightfully individual letter can come only from a big ranch in the Northwest. One feels the personality of the writer, like a dynamo, through all she writes. A Rocky Mountain breeze blows through her words; and her day, we know, is only one among many equally dramatic and interesting.

"This morning I was wakened by the sun as it first shone in at my window. As it was only a quarter of five I covered my eyes for one more nap. We have cool nights, but yesterday it was 104 in the shade. Soon I heard Papa get up, so I did likewise. I built a fire in the kitchen range and cooked my own breakfast. 'Cookie Sis' was not up and Papa does not eat breakfast.

"I thought the rest had slept long enough, so I turned on the water near the house and began to carry wash water. That got them up. While my water was heating, I gathered the clothes, swept four rooms, irrigated a little on the garden, and picked up chips. Then I washed—they call me the 'family laundry.' I must be somewhat Irish, too, for I must have everything in the house and on me washed clean.

"At noon I was still washing. While waiting for dinner, one of the hired men struck a bargain with me. He is to bring down his spring and summer collection of seventeen dirty shirts; I am to show him how to wash them and then I may iron them. I promised because I believe in helping my neighbor, because this fellow sometimes takes my sister riding in his new buggy, and because he and I have red hair.

"Dinner was good even though served on our decrepit ranch dishes. We are running three kitchens. We have good meals always. We eat well and work hard for what we get here in the West.

"In the afternoon I finished the washing, helped clean the house, and mended. After three o'clock I sat here in a cool room by an open window watching Papa mow alfalfa and the men stack grain. The children were in swimming. By and by one of my chums drove by on her way home from town. We visit thus mostly.

"Supper at six. I ironed before and after, as long as the irons were hot. Now at sunset my work is done. But Papa is irrigating—that takes twenty-four hours a day.

"This was a typical working day; but it would have been as natural for me to have described one of the six days last week when I spent ten hours a day hoeing corn. To-morrow we girls will put on overalls and shock hay. Don't let it shock you—we live in the West!

"The trouble with farming is that the days are not long enough for work or the nights long enough for sleep."

The writer of the following "typical day" has become early the possessor of husband and child; but we shall not omit her story on that account. She lives sixty miles from the railroad station and has wonderful mountains about her horizon. Her account of one of her marvelous days may be commended to all country people wherever they may be found. The joy of work and the joy of living, here reach a climax together:

"It is dusk. The children and I have just come in from the corral, where I milked seven cows. I am so in love with life that I find a day very short to hold its allotted joys.

"First, I awoke a little earlier than usual this morning and lay thinking over the 'had-to-be-dones.' It was baking day; but that is a glad-to-be as well as the other, because I love to experiment outside of the cookbooks. At half-past five I arose and by half-past six had breakfast on the table and my bread set. By eight o'clock we had breakfasted and I had the seven cows milked. How I love my gentle cows! What an inspiration their calm patience is! And I love to get out at that hour. At this altitude the mornings are always chilly but by eight it is pleasant. At half-past eight I had the three larger children dressed and at breakfast, while I ran the milk through the separator. While the children finished, I went again to the barnyard, where I fed my little chicks and turkeys and looked after the rest. I have two rows of flowers between the barnyard and the house, so I stopped a few minutes to smell the sweet-peas, to admire the gorgeous colors of the poppies, and to pull a few weeds. By ten I had baby Robert bathed and all his little wants attended to, the breakfast dishes and the milk things washed, my bread in the oven and my dinner started. So I sat down to churn and to read while I churned. I use an old-fashioned dash churn, therefore I have an excuse for sitting down. I am glad of it, for I can read then. By twelve I have my sweet golden butter printed, have heard Jerrine's lessons and have dinner ready. By half-past one we have had dinner and I have the kitchen in order and we all lie down for a rest. At two I begin making the beds, by three the whole house is straightened, so I have two hours for myself. I read a little story for the kiddies and then send them all to play while I read a little. I write a couple of letters and then go out to hoe and pull weeds a while. I cook most of my supper while I cook dinner so I can prepare supper in a few minutes. So I feed my biddies, and the children gather the eggs, until we hear the men coming in from the field. By seven o'clock we have had supper, and Baby is put to bed. Jerrine helps me put the kitchen to rights. Then comes the goodest part of the day. We go to milk. Jerrine and Calvin sit in the wagon out of harm's way and I milk. Jerrine lets the cows in for me and empties the milk. We all enjoy the beauties of the sunset, the beautiful colors, the crisp little mountain breeze. By nine the kiddies have had their bath and are in bed. Daddy-man is playing the phonograph so they can go to sleep lulled by Annie Laurie, Bonnie Doon and The Sword of Bunker Hill. Now that I have that line written I see it is rather an odd thing to be lulled by a sword, but I reckon you can figure out the meaning. At ten o'clock my day will be finished. I shall finish this paper and read a little with Daddy-man and then it will be my bed-time. As I finish I see I have left out many little joys. I have kissed little hands to make hurts well perhaps a dozen times. I matched some colors and cut some blocks for Jerrine's patch work; I made a finger-stall for the hired man. I have answered the 'phone a few times and— Now if some university can help me to make my days more elastic so that they can encompass all my joys comfortably, I shall be glad. There's so much I want to do but— Good-night."

The writer of the following story goes beyond the one typical day and for the sake of a more accurate treatment of her program includes a whole week. Thus is recorded the general plan of the American housework system as it is carried on to-day. She says:

"A representative week of my life at home in the summer is easier to describe than one day, for each day is individual to itself. To begin with the most interesting occupation of the morning, I get up at about five-thirty in time to toast the bread for breakfast. After breakfast I take care of the milk and then Mother and I wash the dishes. Sweeping, dusting and putting in order the kitchen, dining-room and living-room comes next. The hard-wood floor in the kitchen is mopped twice a week. Next the bedrooms are put in order. This regular morning work takes from an hour to an hour and a half. On Monday we always do the family washing, which generally takes me about three hours and a half when Mother hangs up the clothes. Mother bakes the bread, prepares the vegetables for dinner and plans the desserts. If she needs me I sometimes help with these. She lets me bake the cake and what extra bread is needed for variety, such as brown bread, graham, cornbread, etc. Monday afternoon we generally iron for an hour and a half to start on Tuesday's work. After the ironing is finished I sweep and dust the bedrooms, unless something extra comes up, such as indoor painting, varnishing hard-wood floors, cleaning of cupboards, etc. Tuesday afternoon is open for sewing. On Wednesday and Thursday after the morning work is completed Mother and I sometimes go visiting, but generally I spend these days sewing. On Friday there is the weekly sweeping of the living-room, the lamp chimneys to be washed, the windows to be polished and the porch to be cleaned. Sometimes there is company expected Saturday or Sunday, so that I do part of this work Thursday. Saturday morning there is a cake to be iced and in the afternoon we often have callers or else we go somewhere.

"Sunday is a day looked forward to all the week. We sleep a little later Sunday morning and after the morning work is done all the family, consisting at present of Mother, Father, my two brothers and I, get ready for church. In the afternoon we sometimes either go away or have company, but the kind we like best is the good old fashioned kind that we enjoyed when we were children, just to read a favorite book or story for the two or three short but precious hours before chore time. In the afternoon after their naps Mother and Father always enjoy a walk back on the farm. The evening we either enjoy quietly at home or if it is fair weather we attend the evening meeting at the church.

"This is the frame-work of the program of the summer days on the farm. I have said little of the heat because our kitchen is cool, nothing of the work because nothing is worth while which isn't hard work, made emphatic with backache and punctuated with drops of sweat. Gathering the berries, early apples, etc., was omitted because they come in just any time and are fun. Driving on the horse fork, canning fruit, etc., all come in their time, making every day full of busy little tasks."

The following gives the experience of three sisters in an opulent home on the western slope of the Catskills. It seems likely that the writer depreciates her own share in the work and in the success of the systematic household. She says:

"It is difficult to select any one day for a representative farm day program. The work changes with each day in the week and also changes very much with the seasons. In the spring there is the gardening, house cleaning and the raising of chickens, besides the shipping of many crates of eggs to New York. All this is done in the house and, although it is done all the year, in the spring when there are more eggs the work is heavier.

"The chickens are hatched out by incubators in a small house built for that purpose and when hatched they are moved to the brooder house. Here they are cared for until strong enough to be put out doors in brooders. Later they are sorted and put into larger colony houses out in the field. The entire responsibility and work of this is taken by my sister Isabell, so it is needless to say that her program through the spring months would show days that were more than busy.

"In the creamery, from which butter in pound prints is shipped twice a week to private families, the work of wrapping, packing and marking is also done by Isabell. There is more of this work to be done during the winter months than in the summer because so many of the people who take the butter go abroad for the summer months.

"The management of the house, the cooking, and to a large extent the management of the business fall to my oldest sister, Elizabeth. We have two dining-rooms, one for the men, of whom there are sometimes as many as eight—and the other where we eat. For the housework we have no outside help except a woman who comes in once a week to bake for us and who also does the washing for the men. Our own washing is done by Elizabeth, with the aid of a power machine and steam which is piped from the creamery to the laundry.

"During the summer Elizabeth cans berries, fruits, beans, corn and tomatoes in as large amounts as our garden may produce for winter use. Ham, bacon and sausage are also made on the place. Even soap is made in the big iron kettles in just the same way that our grandmothers used to make it. Many people marvel at the amount of work which is done here without any apparent confusion, and the reason for this is to a large extent due to my sisters' management. We have electric lights and steam heat and the kitchen is arranged in every way to save unnecessary labor.

"As for social life, we are not able to have as many guests here or to go to as many things in town as when we had sufficient girls in the kitchen. Most of our friends live in town six miles distant. This is due probably to the fact that we all went to High School there. We have a driving horse and go to most of the social things in town which occur in the afternoon. We rarely go down at night unless there is some exceptional event. My sister belongs to several clubs in town and recently has organized a study and social club among the farm women of this immediate vicinity. I think if one asked my busy sister what kind of recreation she enjoyed most, she would answer horseback riding and shooting. Most of the time we are too busy and interested in things here to complain about being far away from things in town. Sometimes, however, when the roads are bad, it becomes monotonous to be shut away from the outside world, and I can easily see how this phase of farming is often the reason for great discontent.

"My part in the community is rather small. I just help, and when the other members of the family go away, I fill their places. The year Isabell was at Cornell I had charge of the chickens. Now the bees occupy a great deal of my time.

"I don't know as it is necessary after writing all this to add a program of a day, but I will simply put down the things I do in a day which isn't especially rushed.

"I get up at about 6:15 or am supposed to. My sisters get up earlier. After I have eaten my breakfast I prepare the potatoes for dinner. By that time all the men have had their breakfast and I wash the dishes and clean up things in general. Then there are beds to be made and perhaps rooms to be cleaned. After that some mornings I go to the creamery and wrap butter, but recently I have worked for an hour or so fixing bee equipment. About 10:30 on some mornings, I put on my bee togs and work with them until nearly dinner time, when I set the table and help get dinner. After dinner I wash the dishes and, unless there is garden picking or preparing of something for canning to do, as there often is, I am free until about four-thirty. If I go to town I leave directly after dinner and get back about six. We don't go down a great deal however. During the afternoon the mail comes bringing the daily paper and at the end of the month the magazines. The entire family take turns reading the paper, and the magazines are read at the first opportunity. We sew, do little odd things, and are never at loss as to how to spend the time. Supper is at five, so the men can milk after it. I wash dishes or gather eggs after supper and unless something turns up to do am free. We often pick garden things for the next day because it is cool then."

The itinerary of the American Country Girl might thus be followed from the energizing cool of the morning when the impact of the day's work is so buoyantly met to the quieting cool of the evening when rest is so joyously welcomed. So far in our investigation there has always been some source of hope and enthusiasm to be discovered. If the margin of unbearable drudgery seems to be reached, there is the solace of music at evening when the whole family join in an orchestra of violin, cornet and piano. If the days seem to grow unendurably monotonous, a pageant looms on the horizon to capture the interest and to make life fascinating at once. A fourteen-hour day of hard labor is broken by a recess in the midst to write a letter and send it out to some girl friend in the great big world that shall keep the secluded spirit in some touch with the outside currents of life. At the stroke of eleven the daily paper comes; at the twentieth of the month the magazine. A French or an organ lesson is possible; and life, though burdened is kept enlivened on every side. In such homes, work is not drudgery and the word "monotonous" has no fatal meaning.

Perhaps it may be said that there is always something that can be found, if it is looked for searchingly enough, to make a life of hard work bearable. Work is good; all of us write that down on paper and believe that we believe it. But when the principle is illustrated in a practical form many things are required to sustain our conviction. There must be a meaning, a hope, a definition, a goal. Each life is a system set in with other systems. To make one of them a success, all must move on right lines toward the chosen end. Other letters from these sensible young women in the rural realm will perhaps make us feel this more keenly than the foregoing.

CHAPTER V

WHAT ONE COUNTRY GIRL DID

THORN APPLES AND SWEET ACORNS

I love the taste of thorn apples and sweet acorns and sumac and choke-cherries and all the wild things we used to find on the road to school.

And I love the feel of pussy willows and the inside of chestnut burrs.

I love to walk on a country road where only a few double teams have left a strip of turf in the middle of the track.

And I love the creaking of the sleigh runners and the snapping of nail-heads in the clapboards on a bitter cold January night.

In the first cool nights I love the sound of the first hard rainfall on the roof of the gable room.

And I love the smell of the dead leaves in the woods in the fall.

I love the odor of those red apples that grew on the trees that died before I went back to grandpa's again.

I love the fragrance of the first pink and blue hepaticas which have hardly any scent at all.

I love the smell of the big summer raindrops on the dusty dry steps of the school house.

I love the breath of the great corn fields when you ride past them on an August evening in the dark.

And I love to see the wind blowing over tall grass.

I love the yellow afternoon light that turns all the trees and shrubs to gold.

I love to see the shadow of a cloud moving over the valley, especially where the different fields have different colors like a great checkerboard.

I love the little ford over Turtle Creek where they didn't build the bridge after the freshet.

I love the sunset on the hill in Winnebago County, where I used to sit and pray about my mental arithmetic lesson the spring I taught school!

Elisabeth Wilson.

CHAPTER V

WHAT ONE COUNTRY GIRL DID

It may be interesting to some of the Country Girls who read this book to see not only some pictures here and there from the life history of girls but also to look over several more detailed accounts, so that they may realize more fully what the new era in country life means to a young woman on the farm who takes hold of her problem with vigor and enthusiasm. To gratify this desire there will be given in this and the following chapters, with the kind permission of the writers, a number of sketches in some detail of the experiences of several girls, who though they represent widely separated regions of the country, still seem to be moved by a like impulse toward an advance in efficiency and power of service.

The first of these accounts expresses the great awakening of southern womanhood in the new activity of the "beloved southland." This story is especially interesting because it shows what one girl has done just with what she had, and how she found that she had a great deal more to work with than she had dreamed. The writer of the many letters from which the account is framed, is a little over twenty years old, and lives on a farm of two hundred acres, twenty-five of which are cleared. The nearest village, which consists of just a score of houses, is three miles from her farm. The land is not productive without fertilizer, but at the best produces a fair crop of corn and sweet potatoes.

This is the way the farm looked when she first saw it: "Around the house was an old-fashioned flower garden planted years before. The woods and creek were beautiful. The day we arrived, after we had crossed the creek and were inside the clearing, what we saw made us forget the long drive through black stumps and fallen trees. The oaks were just coming into leaf. The dogwoods formed a semi-circle around the place and were white with bloom against the green of the pines, while the wisteria hung in great clusters and the bridal wreath was one heap of white flowers."

This was the first entrancing glimpse. But any one who knows about farm work, realizes that this view of a run-down, neglected old place means a long struggle. Nature has reached out hands to pull the whole cultivation back into the wilderness. In that tangled fragrant clearing was waiting a severe test for a trained farmer, not to say, for a beginner. But this girl was determined to live on the farm, and she stood ready to face all difficulties in the attainment of her desire. That neglected garden was typical. She soon had it cleaned and the bulbs reset, and it was not long before there were flowers for every month in the year. All difficulties seem to have been met with a spirit of determination and of cheer. "We were crazy," she declares, "to live on a farm and determined not to fail; but as soon as one problem was solved, another would bob up. There was never a day without some unexpected happening, and adventures were plentiful."

She would have amply proved that she appreciated the attractiveness of farm life if she had not classified her thoughts and set them down so neatly. To her the charm of life on the farm consists, first, in the fresh air and wholesome food, with plenty of fruit and vegetables, together with the pleasure of helping to produce and prepare the food. In her opinion having to depend upon one's self to decide courses of action as much as you do in farm life, gives one backbone and trains one to rely upon self and to be an effective leader. She has, as most true country people have, an ineradicable and fundamental passion for independence. In town one may have the advice of the minister, the doctor and the lawyer; but in the country, she says, it is the Lord and I. Again, it takes much less time and less expense to keep up appearances in dress in the country; one is freer from interruptions than in town, and ties of kinship are stronger among people of the country. No, the farm is not monotonous; one acquires a liberal education just by being alive; nature study, the work in the flower garden, affords constant variety; and there are new interests and adventures every day.

This girl has also thought on the other side of the question, and she can see that there may be reasons why one may prefer to leave the farm. One may feel the lack of companionship near one's own age and the lack of recreation. Too much importance may be placed on field work to the neglect of the garden; unkind criticism by neighbors may be the only recreation available; and not paying the women of the family for their aid in the household service, may be in her mind sufficient reasons for desertion. These, in short, are some of the things she emphasized.

An average day of her life on the farm is a busy one. She says:

"The sun wakes me up in the morning, or maybe it is the mocking-birds singing. I work in the garden gathering the vegetables, picking the flowers, or cultivating, until breakfast time. After breakfast I make the beds and straighten the bedrooms; then I work in the garden again until about 9:30 or 10:00 o'clock. Then I come in and help with the dinner or sew or study or write, and if it is bread-baking day I always knead the bread and prepare it for the oven. As we have breakfast about five-thirty o'clock we get so hungry we have dinner about 11:30. After dinner we rest a half hour either by reading or by lying down. In the afternoon after a bath I study or sew until it is cool enough to work in the garden. For supper we only make coffee and warm over something left from dinner. We have supper at five o'clock, but usually have a bowl of clabber or a glass of milk before going to bed. I work in the garden until dark; then we talk a while and go to bed about nine o'clock. In the winter we talk or read after supper until bed-time. However, in canning time the study, the sewing, and a good part of the reading are put aside."

It is evident that her share in the housework is not a small one. She does the sewing and much of the gardening, taking entire care of the flower-garden. She does marvels of canning; she keeps the accounts; she straightens out the rooms, and helps with the cooking. She runs the errands, waiting on the father, who is permanently disabled. To facilitate her work she has a sewing machine, an oil stove, a pump near the door, and a wheel-hoe. What she desires in the way of equipment in order to make her housekeeping easier are these only—her thoughts for herself have not flown very high!—a kitchen cabinet and a clothes wringer. Since they eat a great deal of cream cheese and lots of fruit and vegetables raw, she does not feel that they need a fireless cooker; but she does greatly need a canner. Since the canner is so frequently offered as a prize, this need will no doubt be soon supplied.

The recreations of this hard-working girl consist of reading, going visiting, walking, studying nature, making a flower garden, and writing letters. She also naïvely includes going to Sunday School among her recreations. She takes an excursion to the shore once in a great while; but only seldom has she the time for that. She can have the use of a conveyance at convenience, and on Saturday she and her mother drive to town and occasionally on Sunday to church. Has she no games? No, she is an only child and has never had any playmate in the home. Besides the flower garden and nature study form her recreation. But she thoughtfully encloses in one letter a list of games that she thinks girls may like to know about and gives a bibliography of articles on games for young folks in the woman's paper they are accustomed to take in her home. In her community there are perhaps twenty-five young people. They have a dance once or twice a month and a picnic twice a year; and there is a school social every two months. The social life of the village centers about the school as much as anywhere. Perhaps they could attract more interest to the church if the members of the church choir only had tact and facility enough. They have no resident minister and therefore the church lacks a centralizing element. But the village has a hall with a platform, a two-roomed school house, and a tennis court, as facilities for a social center. There is also a rest room at the ice cream parlor and back of the church there is another hall. One would say that there was no excuse for this town if it did not have a thriving social life and a good time for everybody on the highest lines. And ought they not to overcome all separating difficulties, if there be any such, and establish a regular pastor and begin to have a real community life? For how can a town with all those advantages hold up its head among the towns of America if it has a church building and no church therein? Certainly though one girl can do much, she cannot do all.

One may judge any girl by the books she sets down as her favorite reading matter: This farm girl mentions The Bible, Shakespeare, Silas Marner, Days Off, The Calling of Dan Matthews, Alice in Wonderland, Little Women, John Halifax Gentleman, Lorna Doone, David Harum, The Little Minister, Distractions of Marietta, The Chimes, Treasure Island, Josephus, Lady of the Lake, Rose and Ring, Prince Otto, Red Badge of Courage, Poems of All Great Poets, Idylls of the King, Department of Agriculture Bulletins, Botanies and School books. To this list she adds the name of the woman's paper she and her mother had taken, the file of which she has preserved for some years. Those she underscores as the ones she reads with most delight are these: Little Women, Little Minister, Alice in Wonderland, and all the stories in her woman's paper. The serial story appeals to her most, because she has to wonder how it is going to come out.

She does not let anything interfere with reading an hour or so every day. She and her mother read together a great deal. She reads to her mother articles in the woman's paper, and the poetry of Lewis in the Houston Post. They take several weekly papers, three monthly magazines, and a daily city paper. She herself took two of these, the woman's paper and one of the most vital of the national weekly journals. She likes these two best—one because it gives the home view and the other because it gives the world view. They supplement each other, she thinks, and help one to develop a well balanced mind and character.

Her other cultural interests, however, are centered in the household tasks and in helping in the Sunday School, and she finds these so interesting that the days are all too short. The Sunday School must mean a great deal to her for she mentions it as a cultural as well as a recreational resource. It was about four years ago that the Sunday School was started. They had good music for about two years, one family playing all the instruments. Through the librarian she loaned her books, bringing them as they were called for. The librarian saved her the trouble of asking for the return of the books and in five years only one was lost. They also had a plan for passing their magazines about. Every Sunday when she went to church she would take armloads of flowers to give away; and if any one wanted plants or bulbs she brought them on request. This seems so delightfully practical. Why should not the church door be a place for the exchange of free will offerings of all kinds?

There seems on first view very little opportunity for a girl in some secluded farm to learn much about the great fields of classic art. This girl is one to whom art subjects have a great appeal though she feels the lack of opportunity to develop this interest. She draws enough to have some appreciation of form and tone and she studies reproductions of famous paintings; she enjoys especially watching the sunrise and the sunset, and the stars on a clear night. Nothing in nature is alien to her. Trees, birds, ferns, wild flowers and garden flowers, all are beloved. She has the scientific spirit as well as the artistic. She has made collections of pressed wild flowers, and the expert consulting botanist of the United States Department of Agriculture Bureau of Plant Industry names them for her. She made two sets of specimens, numbering them, keeping one and sending the other to Washington.

With delightful frankness this efficient Country Girl recounts her financial endeavors. Her chief way of earning money is by raising vegetables for the table and by cutting down expenses by careful planning of the diet. During one year the family had only to pay out $71 for bought groceries, and the eggs helped to pay for that, so that the bought groceries were only $1.50 apiece per month for the four members of the household. Circumstances have thrown a load of responsibility upon this young girl, but unconsciously she was being trained for the work. She was already a unit in the complex structure of the farmstead before she was so acutely needed. In her earlier girlhood her father paid her a salary of ten dollars a month for her household assistance. In doing this he was enlisting her interest in an enterprise to the success of which she was led to feel that she was essential. She responded to this educational method by being ready when the need came to plan wisely and efficiently and to carry out these plans successfully. That first money she earned she was permitted to save. She let it accumulate for a time and when she had a good opportunity she bought a lot with it. After a while she moved a house upon the lot and fixed it up. The family lived there for about a year and then she sold it, making a good profit. During that time they owned a garden and a cow. The garden was held to be her own special property; but her enthusiasm for the whole farm project was no doubt to a good extent the result of the training in responsibility she had received at the hands of her wise parents.

When she found that she could obtain government publications on farming problems, she promptly availed herself of this means of help. Almost as soon as she moved to the farm, her Congressman at her request sent her the publications of the Department on Agricultural Education. There she read about the correspondence work at the Pennsylvania State College; and by the time she had been on the farm four months, she had begun correspondence courses in domestic science and agriculture under that patronage. She completed thirteen subjects: Principles of Cooking, Heating and Ventilation, Canning and Preserving, House Furnishing, Butter-making, Dairy, Breeds of Cattle, Vegetable Gardening, Dressing and Curing Meat, Stock Feeding, Principles of Breeding, Farm Manures, Commercial Fertilizers, and Farm Bookkeeping. For this work she received two certificates. The tuition was free and no books had to be specially purchased for these subjects.

For her home library and text-book facilities for these studies this energetic and persevering girl had at command, besides the bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture, only the file of that household journal that she had taken since 1893. Added to this was the constant advice of her mother, who had had opportunity to observe the work in a large hotel where her husband had once occupied some position that gave her the entrée to the kitchen laboratory. This aid came in well on the household side of the problem.

As one would certainly expect, it is found that this correspondent takes part in all meetings and movements to promote better housekeeping that are at hand. She has the Girls' Canning Club and The United Farm Women. For information in regard to clubs and societies she sent to the colleges receiving federal aid as listed in Circular 971, Office of Experiment Stations. By this means she has begun a thriving intercommunication by letters with many other girls, with whom she exchanges items of information as to what they find out in their canning and gardening experiences. After a little the Bureau of Plant Industry asked her to report the blossoming and ripening of fruit for the region where she lives; in return for this they sent her a whole mail sack of bulletins. These bulletins and others from the Department, together with the household journal which she and her mother had taken for several years, she used in studying the lessons in her correspondence course, making a list of references for each lesson.

The Girls' Canning Club meets at her house, and she prepares the questions for them. She has copied over two hundred recipes on canning for the Department of Agriculture. She hopes to get the National Plant, Flower and Fruit Guild started in her vicinity so that she can send things to the Orphans' Home in the nearest city. For two years she has sent an exhibit of canned products to the Fair—twenty-one varieties in 1912. She read in the papers about the Girls' Tomato Club in an adjoining State and she wrote at once to the professor in charge of the Extension Department of a Polytechnic Institute in her own State, asking him to help start some clubs for girls. This professor soon journeyed to her county to look the situation over and to see what could be done. He became enthusiastic about it and won the interest of the County Superintendent; thus the clubs were soon started under the patronage of the school teachers. At present there are 165 girls in the Canning Clubs of that one county alone. In the Club in the one little village there are seventeen members, nine girls and eight women. They have four meetings and a Canning Party annually. At the last meeting the founder read a paper on The Uses of Tomatoes; she also asked forty questions on tomatoes, five on berries, five on beans and cabbage, and five on jelly. The club is now working on a Tomato History; they will send their exhibits to the Fair where they stand a good chance to win one of the five prizes offered.

The Canning Club also belongs to the United Farm Women. By this organization programs for suggested meetings are sent and at the time for the meeting various bulletins and booklets on the subjects chosen also come. The girls consider those in the Better Babies group a valuable collection. The Club asked the storekeeper in the village to hand out the bulletins on the Care of the Baby to the country customers wherever he hears of the arrival of new babies. He says the people are very thankful for the bulletins.

Among other resources of various kinds that this girl and her friends can call upon is the Daughters of the American Revolution, who through their Conservation Committee offer seven canners as prizes to the Canning Clubs of that State. The members of the Club also receive magazines from the Church Periodical Club, and they pursue extension courses in agricultural subjects. Certain colleges that have correspondence courses on subjects connected with the farm home have been called upon for aid by some of the young women who belong in the realm of this girlhood endeavor. When the girls began to feel the need of beautification about the Church surroundings, they asked the Landscape Gardener of the Bureau of Plant Industry for aid and he drew a blue print plan for setting out the trees and shrubs; now they are asking the same favor for the country school houses in their vicinity.

Community spirit has reached such a height now that effective meetings in the interest of Good Roads are being held. Many people think that this is the final stage in community success, for all things become possible if the roads are good. Says this young enthusiast: "When we have as good roads as they have across the line in the next State, we shall have to move to a pioneer country to find some new problems."

This concludes the report of a wonderful young life—a life full of promise, one that seems to be developing through service, making economical gain and keeping economical balance as she goes along. Nothing greater could be asked, as far as ultimate good is concerned.

CHAPTER VI

STORIES OF OTHER COUNTRY GIRLS

Well then, I now do plainly see
This busy world and I shall ne'er agree;
The very honey of all earthly joy
Does, of all meats, the soonest cloy;
And they, methinks, deserve my pity
Who for it can endure the stings,
The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings
Of that great hive, the city!
Cowley.

CHAPTER VI

STORIES OF OTHER COUNTRY GIRLS

The first of the three stories in this chapter represents the work of a young woman who spends more than half of her time with her mother and an aunt upon an ancestral home in a mountain region of New England. Again we discover what a girl can do who looks about her to see what the needs are and then stands ready to help in any way she can. The ways that are opening before her are many and her life seems likely to be marked by the most joyous of fulfilment in helpfulness and radiating energy.

The farm where she lives has about nine hundred acres and is situated in the edge of a village of some four hundred inhabitants. The place is full of historic interest, and has wonderful views over the mountains in every direction. Such a home as this naturally makes a great claim on the attachment of the open-eyed young woman who writes about it; but she possesses also a pure straightforward love for the simple country wherever found. Watching the growth of plant and animal life has a charm for her. The fresh air, the good water, the abundance of fresh vegetables, and the freedom from the noise and hurry of the city, make a strong appeal. Yet she sees that there might be reason in some complaints against the country system as it is. An absence of cash results for work done by members of the family in the home or in the field; a lack of interesting recreation; a longing for freedom; the narrowness and spirit of criticism in village life: any of these may justify a young woman in going away. As for herself she has no grievance.

Her share in the work on the farm and in the home consists of a good part of the cooking, cleaning, canning and gardening, but it is not too much for her. They have many household conveniences: running water in a barrel, a blue flame oil stove, a bread-mixer, and a carpet-sweeper. She would like a kitchen cabinet, electric lights, a furnace, a vacuum cleaner run by electricity, and a system of plumbing. But these, in that thickly populated region, will doubtless come in the near future.

In the summer her regular work is the care of the garden, and bringing in the vegetables. When they have no hired girl, she washes all the dishes, fills the lamps and the wood-box, and does most of the sweeping and cleaning. She does a great deal of sewing and is occupied with everything from upholstering chairs to making posters for lectures and plays. During the canning season she cans string beans, corn, swiss chard, spinach, beets, carrots, pears, plums, cherries, berries, etc., and makes astrachan jelly enough to supply the church suppers for the whole year. She seldom has a chance to sit down unless it be to prepare the vegetables for dinner. Her afternoons are taken up with club work, or with other outside activities, with time for an occasional walk with her mother, or an informal call. Evenings there is either choir practise, Christian Endeavor meetings, Grange, church suppers, Club work, or plays, with business letters and sewing to fill up whatever time remains.

Yet room is made for a little music. There is a piano in the home and they sometimes have hymns and old standard songs in the evening. When sewing is to be done, some one always reads aloud. The house is well supplied with books. There are most of the standard books though few novels and little light reading. The newspapers and magazines are read aloud evenings. The table is well supplied with periodicals: they take the Outlook, the Independent, the Geographic Magazine, the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Hampshire Gazette. For herself alone she takes Wohelo, the Camp Fire magazine, and if she should add another it would be the Survey. That would help her most, as her reading at present is along the lines of sociology. To be sure, her reading is somewhat interfered with by housework, sewing, and occupation with outside interests. Besides she has too much physical vitality to sit still long. But if she does need more books than her own house supplies, there is a public library a quarter of a mile away. She is a trustee of this library and goes there twice a week. She helps the librarian catalog the new books, obtains loan agricultural library books, exchanges books with other towns, and obtains agricultural bulletins,—thus making herself an invaluable helper to the whole region. She sees to it that the library gives help to those that are interested in nature study. She herself has an interest in birds and wild flowers. In her home they have a stuffed collection of fifty or more species of birds. She modestly says that she "knows ferns somewhat." Thanks to her ministrations the town library has books on all those subjects. The chief sources of culture in the village, she says, are the library, the Grange, the stereopticon lectures, and a good pastor.

In order that she may do her full share in helping to promote the general welfare, she has become Guardian of a Camp Fire Club and in that group does all she can to encourage efficiency among the girls. She takes a vital interest in all the organizations for young people. There cannot be a girl in that region who does not know that if she wants any good thing this older girl stands ready to help her. She is herself a Unitarian but she has no sectarian prejudice against working in the Christian Endeavor Society and she shows this by taking part in the meetings every Sunday evening. She owns the only stereopticon in town and generously sees to getting the slides for the monthly lectures. She sings in the church choir. She keeps more or less in touch with the school superintendent who is very responsive to suggestions and she tries to help him and the five district school teachers in every way she can. She is medical temperance superintendent in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In this connection she puts up posters and prepares charts for the school children. She is Guardian not only for the Camp Fire Girls but also for the Bluebirds, which is organized for the girls under twelve.

As to earning money, she is so happy as not to have to work for that at present. However, "on the place," she says, "I think I could earn by making jelly, if I could find a market. In the past, when we were living elsewhere, I was given seventy-five dollars a month to pay my share of the housekeeping accounts (which I ran) and to lay aside. Now on the farm, I do not have any set sum, but I own a share in the farm."

Asked if this sharing in the ownership made her more enthusiastic for the success of the farm, she answered that she thought it did. She would like to know of more ways of earning money that she might recommend them to her Camp Fire Girls. She has had no special education for farming as a business or for home-making; but she follows the suggestions of an agricultural teacher in a high school in the next town, and she reads up on various lines of home work in connection with the judging of the work of the girls in the Camp Fire, and she has taken two courses at a college in household chemistry.

A life of such incessant activity must have a great deal of joy in it. There are, however, some special forms of recreation accessible to her. There is a Fourth of July celebration with floats and a parade; there are athletic contests; there is baseball, and there is an entertainment consisting of a play, and other exercises. There are occasional school picnics, and plays are given by the Grange or by the Camp Fire Girls. Sunday evening stereopticon lectures are run by the Christian Endeavor Society. She attends the baseball games, the W. C. T. U. parties; the Cradle Roll parties, the Camp Fire parties, and the Bluebird parties for the little club girls.

Social life centers about Church and Grange. There are enough girls to have societies of their own and though they live widely apart, it seems that this girl with the spirit of a leader is able to draw them together. Though she is very modest about her part of the attraction, she could doubtless say, if she would, "a great part of it I was!" There are about a dozen young people in about a dozen houses in her village and there is something going on once a week or oftener which is specially for the girls.

There is a great deal more that might be said about this faithful and enthusiastic worker. Her loyal following in the path that first opened before her has led her into a special field of moral education where her efficiency and fine spirit are making her useful not only to her own region but to a much wider circle. She has been trained for a service which it is a joy to render.

The second record in this group represents the great bounding life of the Northwest, and is as full of the new elixir of country life as the other accounts given.

The writer says: "I could tell you volumes about our Western rural life," and if there were room, those "volumes" should be included. She is twenty-one years old, and is one in a family of ten children. The farm she refers to is one owned by her grandfather and there she spends a great deal of her time and lavishes a great deal of work. There are eighty acres; forty of them are hilly, unirrigated lands, while five acres are still in sage-brush. The rest is irrigated by electric pumped water. The nearest town is six miles away and has twenty-two hundred people.

Many charming glimpses are given of the home this girl represents. She is an enthusiast for the possibilities of farm life. She prizes it because she finds that freedom of action is possible there in matters of dress and in the choice of companions. All desired urban benefits—such as lectures, church, organizations and social events, seem to have become accessible to her. She thinks, too, that the farm realizes outdoor life at its best. There is plenty to do—this she rates as one of the great advantages—and she adds this pregnant sentence, "what one does is of consequence."

She acknowledges that parents might desire to go away from the farm in order to put children in a town school. But she adds: "I'd rather take them to a good centralized country school. I have taught in town and country both, and am now teaching a country school under town supervision with ten pupils and every advantage. As I keep house for my grandfather on a dry homestead two miles from school, I have the fun of walking to and from the schoolhouse."

Again she says that people may go to the town in order to spend their money; town, she says, is a good place to go for that purpose. She adds this caustic note: "But my father made money in town and spent it in the country—as long as he kept tenants on his farm!"

Her share in the housework is ample and joyous. She says: "Myself and two grown sisters, both younger than I, take turns about doing the entire housework. The rest work in the garden and the field, irrigating, hoeing, etc. I prefer outside work too, but I always wash and iron, even when I am working outside." Her home conveniences are a washing-machine, a pump in the house, running water at the door, a telephone, the daily weather reports, a typewriter, a sewing-machine, screened windows and doors, and homemade soap. Who but a girl of the great untrammelled Northwest would call the weather reports a home convenience, or think of including homemade soap? Of course she is not satisfied: she would like electrically pumped water, electric lights, ice, and a gasolene stove. Some of these she hopes to have next year, and the electric stove will doubtless come too and other new and important things.

Opportunity for recreation is not wanting. There are fishing on the place, swimming in the large irrigation canal, and buggy riding. In winter there is dancing at farm homes; visits are made over the 'phone. Sewing and sewing bees are recreation; so are reading and writing letters. Caring for small brothers and sisters seems to come under the same head; water-color painting, hunting jack-rabbits and grouse, taking kodak pictures, going to picnics and celebrations, camping in the mountains, lectures, lodge, and socials in town, horseback riding and day dreaming do not seem so difficult to include. She harnesses and drives, hitching up to the buggy, the democrat, or even the jockey cart; she rides the bicycle and expects to drive an auto—"some day." All the games they play in that large and varied family are "to work, and to tease one another." Evidently here is a place on the planet where work and play run into each other and become one and the same thing! She says: "There seems to be no necessity for games." She adds: "We older ones often amuse and watch the three children play."

As to the number of young people in the vicinity she says that there are about twenty "within this natural district." During the school year they have about six social gatherings; in summer there are informal picnics and Sunday visits with refreshments. Social life centers about the school and the doings in the adjacent town. Among some of the neighbors there is a German Club. As facilities for a social center, they have the schoolhouse (but with stationary seats), a playground, any number of natural groves and of fishing holes, and the big ditch for swimming. For the girls alone they have swimming parties and visiting parties; and they help one another during haying and threshing. This she puts down among the social gatherings for girls in her neighborhood!

In the house there is a library of about two hundred and fifty volumes. Lack of time is the only thing that prevents reading. There is a public library in the nearest town and she goes there every week in winter. In summer however she is too busy with farm work to go so often. In the family evenings either she or her mother reads aloud: also on Sunday afternoon. The books that they have thus read together of late are Lorna Doone and one by Wason called Friar Tuck which she marks an underscored "Good."

They have a piano and the favorite songs are such old favorites as Annie Laurie and Juanita. Also they sing church songs, and popular tunes, such as The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. They adapt the music to the different tastes in the ten-children family.

Besides the daily evening paper and the local weekly paper, they take Successful Farming, Better Fruit, Scientific American, American Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Epworth Herald, some law papers, the government bulletins and reports, Current Opinion, etc. For her own interests she is going to take Epworth Herald, Primary Education, Youth's Companion, American Geographical Magazine, Current Opinion, Stock Reports, Successful Farming. Her other cultural interests are these: Music; school, especially high school entertainments, correspondence with normal school friends; teachers' institute, each fall, one week; water-coloring; making beautiful clothes and fancy work; Rebecca Lodge; Church in town; amateur photography; and reading, underscored again. It is fascinating to see what a girl like this will include under the head of "cultural interest."

On the question of earning and using money, she says: "From the time we were very small we earned all our spending money by being paid for extra work. I have been absolutely independent, even to buying my clothes, since I was seventeen years old. I figure that my work more than pays my board." First among the ways of earning money, she names hoeing corn; next she mentions teaching school. "I teach school nine months of the year. Before I began that and ever since, I have earned money. I put myself through the Normal School. I packed prunes (at four cents an hour), sold garden truck (twenty-five cents a day, average—did no peddling), and sewed for others at usual rates." No special sum is set apart for her use but she has all she earns. In teaching she receives sixty dollars a month. She has taught for this salary for two years and with this she has paid two hundred dollars she had borrowed for her school expenses. She has four hundred dollars remaining. Most of this is now in interest-bearing notes on farm securities. She adds: "I buy my clothes, go one-half on board with grandfather on the homestead, and am beginning a 'hope-box.'" She is to have a share in the corn crop. "When I am married," she says, "I expect to invest some in cattle for beef." The vital question as to whether her sharing in this ownership makes her have more enthusiasm for the success of the farm, receives this answer: "Certainly; you should have seen me top the corn when it got frosted June 6. It's doing fine now; I think we saved it, for it was frozen to the ground." She has read all on the subject of farming that she could find. She took some work in the Normal School—enough, she says, to make her realize that she knew very little; she believes she could do much through correspondence. Her interest is now about equally divided between farming and home economics: but, she is good enough to confide, "I expect to make home-making predominate some day." Ah, then this is the true meaning of that "hope-box"! This efficient girl is to be a farmer's wife and she wishes to know how to do her part in helping run a grain-haystock ranch of a thousand acres successfully. So she has taken one year at the Normal School in Home Economics and some studies in agriculture also; she studied family sociology in a forty weeks' course; and she has given some study to the laws governing women's property. May her hope-box overflow! May she in time run her own car, and may all her schemes work out perfectly!

Is there room to put down just one more story? This one has been sent by a friend who for years has been teaching in the Idaho Industrial Institute, a school where they train boys and girls for farm life. The writer of the paper, a girl of nineteen, interested her especially and she asked her to write a brief record. The farm where this girl lives is in a hilly region and is productive; they have from it oats, wheat, clover, timothy, and potatoes. There are 160 acres, and they are six miles from town.

"Farm life to me is attractive," she says, "because on the farm one has the freedom that cannot be gained anywhere else in the world. One learns the habits of birds and animals and one comes in touch with nature and hence with the Creator himself. Children raised on the farm grow strong in body and spirit, and they store their minds with more venturous thoughts. By living on the farm one gets all the fresh vegetables, fruits, butter, milk, eggs and meat that one desires. But of course there may be reasons why one might desire to leave the farm. One may get the idea that one has to work harder for less pay than elsewhere. One may think that the pleasures are few and that farm life is not respectable enough, and that if one could only leave and go to the city, one would be contented. But any one leaving the farm will never be happy while away and will soon learn that there is no place in life like the farm."

This young woman shows the usual picture of work and of small opportunity for social enjoyments. These are her books: The Bible, Stephen, Soldier of the Cross, Jesus of Nazareth, The Coming King, Tempest and Sunshine, The Broken Wedding Ring, Sweet Girl Graduate, Daddie's Girl, Wild Kitty, Girls of the Forest, Ruby or a Heart of Gold, Taking Her Father's Place, Now or Never. She was very much delighted, she says, with all in this list. She has the long winter's evenings to read in but the additional work in summer interferes somewhat with her reading. They have no musical instrument in the home but they have many of the best hymn-books and country songs, and they sing hymns together. She is very much interested in ways of making better homes. She herself takes the Mother's Magazine and The Christian Endeavor World, and is pursuing a course in Home Economics at the present time.

A single working day of her life is thus described:

"One bright morning in early July I was awakened by my mother who told me that it was half-past four. I arose immediately for I had had a good night's rest and did not feel sleepy. I dressed in my riding habit and went to the barn and waked my brother who was sleeping in the hay-loft and asked him to come and saddle my pony, 'Daisy.' He saddled her and I mounted and went to the timber for the cows. The air was fresh and cool. It filled me with joy and seemed to affect Daisy the same, for she threw her ears forward, listened a second for the cows, and hearing the tinkle of the bell she started out on a gallop. After about a half hour's ride I found the cows and drove them home. When I had taken the saddle from Daisy and given her her breakfast and a few loving caresses I left her and went to the house, arriving just in time for breakfast. After breakfast I told my two sisters I would do the housework myself while they washed. I had an early start, was in high spirits and ready for the day's work before me. It did not take me long to plan my dinner, which I decided should consist of baked potatoes, creamed carrots, greens, and radishes, all fresh from the garden. For dessert I made blanc mange with cocoa sauce. I had plenty of fresh butter, cream, and light-bread at my disposal. The first thing I did on entering my kitchen was to mix up my light-bread. It did not take me long to clear off the breakfast table and put the dining-room in order. When I came to the kitchen I did not find it so easy; but my greatest delight being to set a kitchen in order I did not mind the task before me; but before starting it I did up the milk work which only took me half an hour, there being no churning that morning. I had my kitchen in order and the bread molded by ten o'clock. I then cleaned myself up and read a short story in the Sunday School paper before starting my dinner which I did at ten-thirty. My dinner was a success or at least my father pronounced it so when he had finished eating a not small portion of it. After I had the dinner work cleared away, everything in order and my bread baked, I made my small brother a suit and had it done by the time that my mother had supper ready. After supper again I saddled Daisy and went for the cows while my sisters washed the supper dishes. That evening as we gathered around the kitchen table and my father read a chapter from the Bible, I think I was one of the happiest girls in the world even if I was tired. As I went to bed that evening I thanked the dear Father that I had a father, mother, brothers and sisters to love and help care for. This is only one day out of many that I have spent in this way."

When one reads this account, one pictures the strong vivid life of this sound generous-hearted girl. It seems glorious to be so able and so willing. What, then, will be the surprise when on looking down the page a little farther one sees in the handwriting of the friend who had asked her to write an account of one of her working days, a paragraph like this: "The writer of the above is a cripple, getting about with the aid of a crutch. She entered the Institute this fall and pays half her expenses by working more efficiently than most pupils." After reading this, what words of praise would not sound futile!

CHAPTER VII

THE OTHER SIDE

I cannot bear to think what life would be
With high hope shrunk to endurance; stunted aims
Like broken lances ground to eating knives;
And low achievement doomed from day to day
To distaste of its consciousness.
George Eliot.

CHAPTER VII

THE OTHER SIDE

The experiences related in the last chapters have been purposely laid before the reader with little comment. They make their own impression. They may help to dispel an apprehension lest the girls on the farms should be having too hard a time, or lest when the work in which they are asked to join is closing somewhat too strongly upon their young strength they should be weighed down with the sort of dullness that comes from continued pressure on one nerve. They seem to give an assurance that the country girl's day in many, perhaps the majority, of cases, affords some time for reading and for music; there is a concert in the evening or a spare afternoon hour for the village guest. They encourage us to believe that when the point of joylessness approaches there will be ready a new supply of energy for rejuvenation and refreshment. As long as this state of things exists the case is not so bad.

Into this serene atmosphere a bomb must be thrown; for both sides have a right to be heard. The testimony of the Country Girl when she is speaking in favor of country life has been accepted; the same courtesy must be given her when she tells us more or less frankly—frankly when she can be brought to speak at all—what objections some may have to a life which it seems to many ought to be good for any one, and which, if it is not, surely can very easily be made so.

It is no more than right that a system should be judged not only by the most fortunate example of its working, where factors that have little to do with its essential principles may have crept in to modify the outward appearance, but also by the less known cases, by flagrant examples of what is possible under the existing plan. What wrongs can be found? What sufferings to certain individuals? What must be rectified in order that the machinery may be wholly approved? Is the system, which was evidently designed to foster justice and happiness, accomplishing this end for a reasonable majority? These are very natural questions to those who listen to the testimony of the girl of the rural districts when she discloses her problems almost without knowing that she is doing so. What about exceptional cases? What about a vital minority?

The following description of a Country Girl's working day is taken from the life of a fourteen-year-old girl, who lives on a farm of medium size, so fortunately or so unfortunately placed as to be not very far away from a summer colony. There is no mother in this farmstead.

"Description of my average working day? Here it is. I rise shortly before five o'clock and dress hurriedly. Father is calling me to come and strain the milk and get his breakfast. Go down cellar and strain the milk into pans, set them on a large stone table, and skim the milk for cream for the campers along the lake. Measure out ten to twenty quarts of milk and put them into separate pails to be sent out to customers encamped on the lake. Take cream up stairs and put it in a warm place to ripen for churning. Get breakfast, call the children, and after the others have eaten and the boy has started on his morning delivery, I eat breakfast and clear away the dishes. While sister washes them, I mix bread and set it away to rise. Stir the cream, and then sweep three floors and make five beds. By this time it is nine o'clock. Then there are berries to pick, and vegetables to be got ready for market and I go out to help till about half-past ten, when I come in and make three or four pies and a cake or a pudding. While these are baking I clean the vegetables for dinner and put them on to cook, set the table and put the dinner on, meanwhile watching the baking pies, the rising bread, and the ripening cream. In the course of the morning ten or a dozen persons have come in for milk, eggs, butter, or something else, and I have to wait on them and keep their accounts up in my book. After dinner the bread is ready to make into loaves and is then set to rise again before baking. While the bread is rising I scald out the churn and rinse with cold water and then put in the cream and churn it by hand. After the butter has come and gathered, I remove it from the churn, rinse the buttermilk out and work the butter; salt and work again and set it in the cellar till the next day, when it must be worked again and put into pails or jars. Then I pour the buttermilk from the churn into a jar and set it away for future use, clean and scald the churn, setting it out in the sunshine to dry. By this time the bread is ready to bake and must be watched rather closely and the wood fire also. I begin to get things ready for supper, going out into the garden to pick berries, gather vegetables, dig potatoes, etc. Meantime I wait on more people. After straining milk and skimming other milk, I eat supper and then measure out milk for evening delivery, get vegetables and bread ready to be delivered also and start the boy on delivery. Wash dishes and meanwhile wait on milk customers who are transients. When boy returns from delivery, I wash milk cans and put them out in the air, write up books of accounts, plan out next day's work, make list of groceries, etc., that must be bought to replenish our slender stock. By this time it is ten o'clock; I am weary and my hair is a sight. After taking off a little of the dirt with a sponge in the wash basin I tumble wearily into bed until the next morning."

An account like this arouses a perfect hornets' nest of question-marks. It cannot be well for the nation, and especially for those that are to bear the burden of the day in decades to come that the girls of the present time should in any large numbers be required to endure such strain as this sixteen-hour-day of unremitting, heavy and exacting work imposed upon a young girl between the age of thirteen and seventeen, in one of the largest and most prosperous farming States of this country. Fortunately she has had phenomenal strength and physical persistence, and the baneful conditions have not caused her absolute break-down. But—she has run away! Otherwise she probably would never have gained the development that gave her a voice to speak out for herself as she has spoken in this letter.

More laconic, and yet expressive of a more deadly blight, was the letter from a girl of fifteen in another State. This girl lives on a prosperous seventy-five acre farm, three miles from a good-sized town. There is a public library in that town but she never uses it: and there is no home library to give her any aid. There are no contests, no prizes that are accessible to her to awaken her ambition; and there is no association or society of any kind for girls in her vicinity. There is no music in her family, no games are played, and no magazines are taken; she has no share in any part of the farm business except to work tirelessly as directed; nothing on the farm can she call her own; and no sum of money is set apart for her use. She has no enjoyments, no encouragement; she is hard at work all the time. She neither knows why any one should find the farm attractive nor why one should desire to leave it. Time and interest for her have ceased.

It is news from such a girl as this that most startles us. But such a Country Girl exists, hushed, unexpressive, unresponsive, undeveloped. She is the blind gentian in the country garden. Are there many of these? Who can tell? If diligent search is made for them they are found upon the most remote farms where no newspapers ever penetrate, where the roads are bad and the neighbors are far away or are beyond forbidding hills, where the deadly round of dishwashing or the weight of work too heavy for the years of the girl are exhausting her strength, stifling her exuberance, and deadening all the power of expression she may have been capable of having. The least fortunate girl is the one that has her power to express developed to the least extent; she does not now know her own wants; but yet when told she too will begin to live and to do her lovely part in the rooms of life.

One of the group who has thus begun at last to live voices a part at least of the inwardness of the reason why the young women and young men of to-day will not be satisfied with the ways of their farming ancestors. She says: "There exist on many farms conditions which make life there almost unbearable, to young people particularly. One of them is lack of congenial companionship; which may be due to lack of material, or to the thoughtlessness of the parents, which makes it impossible for the young people to have their friends come to their homes. Then in many farm houses there is a woful lack of books, magazines and papers of the best sort; again due to the lack of education or of interest on the part of the parents. So also with pictures, music and recreation. But perhaps greater than any other, excepting perhaps the first named, is the dull weary succession of duties following each other day in and day out without rest or respite, and without any or with few of the modern conveniences to lighten the work. So many farmers, of the old school at least, understand little of the reasons for the why and wherefore of the things they do. They were taught of their fathers who were taught of their fathers and who did things in such a way because they proved expedient. By trial, or accident, one may have discovered something to be more expedient some other way, but the wonderful process and reason back of it, they understood little or not at all. This also is true of the farmer's wife. This blind way of doing things suits the young folks not, for the unrest, that spirit of the times which is forever questioning things, is within them, filling them with nameless longings even though they know it not. In their ignorance they believe they will find something better in the city, something more beautiful, more interesting, more thrilling. Were these young people taught the reason for things and the possibilities of experimentation to find a better way, were they given conveniences with which to work, so that there might be some leisure for books, music and friends, there would be, I believe, little discontent." Again we find our Country Girl closing with a hopeful note.

The gentle critical comments of those that in spite of their love for country life reject its claims as a mode of living favorable to human development and content, are based upon motives that are sometimes vocational and sometimes social in character. When they deny to the country their allegiance it is because they fail to find in rural life as they know it, those boasted possibilities and opportunities. Farming seems to them drudgery, which means labor without inspiration or acknowledgment. They have no interest for the work. They may have taste and fitness for some other occupation; but there is the fact—they do not take to farming. They feel intensely the monotony of farm life, the stagnation of the rural community. The sameness, the humdrum tediousness of the everyday life drives them to the city.

In the work of the farmstead, the Country Girl of this disheartened group plainly sees that the subsidiary, detail work, which has no intellectual and very little social stimulus will be assigned to her. She knows that the monotony of this heterogeneous drudgery will daily leave her too tired to go out, even if she has somewhere to go; and too destitute of initiative to seize upon any form of pleasure unless she has already a mind trained to find delight in books; and she sees no prospect of being able to gain the training that will open fields of intellectual enjoyment to her. She keenly feels the lack of recreation. She comes to believe that if she were in the city she would not have such late hours of labor. She does not see the twelve and fourteen hour days of work in that rosy dream of good wages and leisured evenings in town. On the farm it is from five in the morning till nine at night; the work is not only too heavy for her, but it is closely confining. She has not the strength for it; and the enforced toil exhausts her energy prematurely. She now sees that the methods used in her household workshop are laborious and out of date; her task is unnecessarily difficult; and who can blame her if under such circumstances her enthusiasm for her work fades away? There is resentment in the remark of the young girl who said: "If we always have to work in an awkward kitchen with rusty old pans, if we do not go anywhere and never have any company, we do certainly want to leave the farm." When the blind gentian speaks out like that the emphasis must be multiplied a hundred fold.

From the work of girls like these, incentive has been removed, or else it was never there. This sort of Country Girl may not reason it out to the point of clearness, but the lack of acknowledgment of her labor in the farmstead as an industry, as an essential part of the business, makes her toil seem hopeless; it renders her feeling toward whatever charm the country may have for her permanently callous; and it takes all the vibrancy out of her spirit. All this makes her alert to find deep-seated defects in rural life in conditions that, but for her disaffection would seem but difficulties easily overcome.

The look cityward is not always caused by the incitement of an uneasy, a commercial, or an ignoble impulse. It is sometimes the call of the best and noblest part of the soul. To such as recognize this higher purpose the passion for education, for free access to libraries, for association with intellectual people, form a part of the city's lure. They desire to see more of life, to have more and closer contact with one's fellows, to gain valuable companionship, to get more and broader pleasures, to have greater opportunities to make something of one's self. The young women who are thinking such thoughts as these are full of the energy of youth; they are at the moment of opening ambitions and developing personality; they are making plans for the future. They are not the women who in long years have grown accustomed to their burdens and have either learned how to bear them or have become sodden with the despair of ever finding any relief from their load. The brightness of young hope has not faded out, and the buoyant spirit still stands up underneath whatever is to be done or borne. Youth feels equal to anything. Therefore the slightest deflection of their courage from the norm should have the closest attention.

CHAPTER VIII

THE INHERITANCE

We men of earth have here the stuff
Of Paradise—we have enough!
We need no other thing to build
The stairs into the Unfulfilled—
No other ivory for the doors—
No other marble for the floors—
No other cedar for the beam
And dome for man's immortal dream.
Here on the path of every day—
Here on the common human way—
Is all the busy gods would take
To build a heaven, to mold and make
New Edens. Ours the stuff sublime
To build Eternity in time!
Edwin Markham.

CHAPTER VIII

THE INHERITANCE

This, then, is the indictment of country life as it now is, by the Country Girl who is now living in the midst of it.

It is depressing, it is terrible, that a concourse of country girls will stand up before The Fathers and declare that while they love the country, and prefer to remain there all their days, yet they cannot, because life there is intolerable to them. They say this in all sobriety; no one can accuse them of speaking in haste; their mood is most judicial. The young woman in the farm life of to-day has a deep-seated love for country life; many things about it command her affection and give her delight; but there are also some things that she does not feel called upon to endure. If it were not for them, for these, and these, and lo! all of these, objections to it, she would be perfectly content and satisfied to live on the farm all her days; but as it is, well, she can only join that funeral procession of the nation cityward.

It is true that the Country Girl does not enjoy a house with no music under its roof-tree, a house where no games are played, where no stories are told or read about the lamp in the long winter evenings: a house, in short, with nothing she calls happiness in it; but this is a small part of her indictment.

She does not enjoy trudging back and forth a million times a year over the same square yards of floor-space; but that, too, is immaterial to her. In fine, she does not object to the work itself, but she cannot endure that heterogeneous, unsystematized, objectless drudgery, the enforced character of the toil, the out-of-date methods, the absence of acknowledgment of any economic value in her contribution to the business—this is what grinds her soul.

She is not wanting in appreciation of the possibilities in farm life and the farming business; but, to quote with variations, she says to herself:

If they be not fair for me,
What care I how fair they be?

She sees the beauty of the changing seasons, and she enjoys the companionship of animals, naming them one by one after all her favorite heroes and heroines of fairyland; but the fact that she has nor chick nor lambkin for her own is as

The little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute.

The Country Girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes their care a pleasure to her.

If the struggle to pay the mortgage is long and the work heavy, she does not especially enjoy spending days and nights of toil with the rest of the family to accomplish the desired end; but more than all this does she dislike having the father keep all the trouble to himself; she wants a share in the responsibility. She wants some acres of her own, some stock of her own. She wants her personality as a factor in the business, which it really is, to be justly acknowledged. For without that, she reasons, what is there to look forward to? Hope is the anchor of the soul; and without something to hope for, how can one hope? She finds that she has none of these joyous anticipations of the future that every young woman loves and has the right to entertain. She cannot look forward to the natural and normal life of the home for her future lot, for the existing scheme of country life does not provide her with a husband.

Therefore if the home cannot be made happy and the work in the farmhouse cannot be made interesting, if her fair share of incentive as a human being in the common round of life cannot be assigned to her, if her part in the complex structure of the farmstead cannot be put upon an equitable basis, if the universal happy fortune of woman cannot be seen to shine as a goal in the long service of the farmstead, why, she will have none of it!

If this is the irrevocable decision of the farmers' daughters of the present day, it is a very serious matter. It means that the farmstead will have to be broken up, that the farm home must go out of existence, and the whole system of farm life must be revolutionized. What will happen then, it passes wisdom to prophesy! The Country Girl may well say, "After me, the deluge!" For if at any one point in the procession of the generations, the women will stand together and say "Thus far and no farther!" the procession must stand as still as the pillar of salt that commemorates the wife of the unfortunate Lot.