The American Country Girl

This scheme is designed to be used for the budget of a family; but it is most important that every young girl, whether in city or country, and whether her purse be a long one or a short one, should know each year whether the demands upon her cash account are exceeding those of the year before, and that she should make up her mind whether there shall be any change in that regard during the year to come. This is a training that every girl should insist upon giving to herself constantly. If she finds herself called "oldmaidish" therefor, she will know that she cannot have earned the name, since there are no old maids any more! The same sort of person must now be called "efficiency administrator."

In suggesting this form of self-discipline to the Country Girl, we know very well that the girl that determines to keep accurate records of her expenses has a good fight before her. Women seem at present to have a preternatural disinclination toward keeping their own accounts, and nearly every girl inherits this bent. In canning clubs for women it is found that the members will do all the delicate measuring accurately; their sense of taste is unerring; their judgment of results is perfect; but they just will not render an account of their work!

That women are not by right of their sex incapable of mathematical processes is shown by the fact that so large a number of women attain distinction in the higher fields of that study, becoming astronomers, computing eclipses and ranging the outer realms of the sky with great telescopes. The rather general dislike of women for the simpler forms of computing probably has grown up in the financially irresponsible state that has become a part of woman's very bone and marrow during late centuries. But it must not be so any longer. Too much depends upon orderliness in finances, for the Country Girl to neglect this means of becoming efficient in her life-work.

All of these card-catalog and other "devices" are a part of a great movement to put efficiency into every human industry. And this movement, again, is a part of the upward striving of mankind. The "industry" that is to be the life-work of the Country Girl must not be behind.

It is claimed that the average farmer puts more thought into his work than the average woman in a farm home puts into hers. This is partly because the seasons make less change in her work than they do in his. But they do make a very great change in her work; and the difference between her work and his in this respect ought not to make the great difference that exists between the amount of foresight he shows in his planning and the dim irresolute bungling that is so often the characteristic of hers. We cannot say that we have an ideal unless we contrive a plan to express that ideal. Something luminous and startling may glow before our eyes and flatter our self-conceit with a hope that seems like a resolution. But without a definite plan, the glow soon vanishes and we are no better for having had it. In fact we are worse. It is a real injury to our soul development to entertain an unfounded ideal and then allow it to fade away before we concentrate it into purpose; for we have deceived ourselves and we have weakened our will.

Now and then we read of some woman of olden time who thought out her plan for the next day after she went to bed at night. She was a prophecy of the present; or rather, of the time to come. Too much cannot be said to the young women of to-day about the necessity of foresight. Foresight is the great bulwark of efficiency. Hurry, they say, is only poor planning; and we know what depredations hurry is making upon our fields of life. The Country Girl, if she wishes to help in the upbuilding of national character, must drive hurry from her field, and this she can do by efficient planning. She must now adopt the systematic spirit in order that when she has a farm home upon her hands she will be ready for the simplification that alone will make her work under the new complications endurable and easy. It will be necessary for her to reduce all to a definite scheme. She must then plan her work by seasons; she must plan it by days, and by hours in the day. She must make records of the time it takes for each part of the work, and she must think out a way to do it in less time. It will be well if she can arrange it so that different kinds of work will overlap, in order that one thing may be preparing while she is doing something else. And if she finds it a weight upon the mind to keep track of so many things at once, she must yield herself to this discipline, knowing that she is thus training her mind for better service and that she will be more fitted to use to good advantage the extra hours that she will thus gain. She will come to the new cultural duty of the hour she has thus wrung from the working period with increased joy and with new powers gained by the strenuousness of the hour's work that went before.

The administration of a house is to call for a higher training in mechanics. Education is giving much more of this now than formerly and will answer the demand for still more. The girls of the country, where this education is needed far more even than in the city, must be prepared to answer this need.

We cannot be expert in the new housekeeping unless we have some comprehension of the chemical processes that constantly go on under our hands. One young woman took for her master's degree a study of the bacterial flora found in spoiled canned peas and string beans. She found that there are some organisms that only grow all the better after they have been boiled one hour. She found that the strongest acids do not inhibit the growth of some other kinds. She has been a good year working on that theme. If she should include one or two other kinds of spoiled foods her work would extend over another year.

How many kinds of bacterial life are there? How many fruits, vegetables, foods of all sorts, are made the home of these various kinds? What processes will protect each kind from becoming harmful to human life? How many hours will it take to show that certain processes will render each variety a safe food? How many young students must give years to the business of finding out what we may use and what we may not? How long will it take us to realize that the detail of preparing the food for the table is a great scientific study, one deserving our highest expertness, meriting our highest honors, to those who work in the laboratory of the university and to those who labor in the laboratory of the house? Every young woman should consider herself a licensed observer; she should watch every process to see what she may learn of nature's secrets, that she may compare it with what she has read and thus make additions to the sum of knowledge that may be beneficial to all.

It is not alone because foods have as close a connection with our well-being that we should study them. They have in themselves an extraordinary fascination. The daily and hourly companion of the worker in the household should be the magnifying-glass. The dissecting microscope is a form of magnifier that is especially adapted for household use and should be within the reach of every one. To get into the habit of putting all foods to the test of this infallible little instrument gives one a great feeling of safety and comfort. Every bag of oatmeal should be examined, all cereals, especially cornmeal, all products that have been kept in any storehouse, should be thus tested. If all the women of the country would use the magnifying-glass on everything that comes into the house, and promptly reject what is not perfectly clean, the level of good health and long life would rise suddenly by perceptible degrees among our people.

If the prospective household administrator cries out that she cannot be bothered with such little things as these, she will be one of those that will be left behind. Those that can be bothered are the people that are to win. The value of the little thing, when it is the pivot for greater things, is one of the discoveries of modern science; and, strangely enough, there is no little thing that is not a pivot for greater things. Our part is to train ourselves to realize this. In the household of the future there will be nothing that the microscope can reveal or the card catalog record that will not be of importance to the success of the whole.

It would be amusing—if it were not so tragic!—to see the utter serenity with which some of the older women will say, "But I have no scientific turn of mind, I do not care for the microscope!" It is as if they said: "But I prefer to murder the members of my family; I do not care to give them the key that will let them out of imprisonment where they have been carelessly but dolorously confined; I have no predilection for dashing away the poison from their lips when unwillingly they are about to drink it!" To such a woman either the word "duty" has no meaning or else she is lacking in instruction as to what duty is. But the coming Country Girl will avoid the mistakes of the past; she will do everything in her power to gain the training that is necessary for her to meet successfully and inspiringly the duties and privileges of the new era.

CHAPTER XV

Epictetus.

CHAPTER XV

HEALTH AND A DAY

"Give me health and a day and I will make ridiculous the pomp of emperors!" cried Emerson.

The ultimate use of health is to make us happy, and the deepest hurt of sickness is that it destroys our power of enjoyment. Moreover, since our happiness when we are at our human best, consists in adding to the welfare and happiness of others, our highest in life is sadly crippled when we allow disease to get the better of us. If we desire to be happy, we should, as the Camp Fire Girls' law says, "hold on to health" and with a tight grip.

It used to be thought that health was a gift of heaven bestowed on certain of its favorites. You had it or you did not have it: that was all there was about it. By pious behavior and prayer perhaps we might gain this benefit from the partial hand of heaven—perhaps not! And if you did anything to help yourself directly to a larger portion of vigor, ate heartily, or took an invigorating walk, you were in danger of indulging a selfish spirit that should be curbed.

We have now changed all that belief. We do know that we may inherit certain disproportions, certain maladies, that interfere with our soundness; these we have to fight against. Knowing them, we can fight intelligently. Our duty lies in taking the resources of strength that we possess, and making the most of them. We are to give ourselves the largest opportunity to make ourselves useful to our friends and to our world in general as much as we may with the portion of vigor that we receive by inheritance, and we are to develop that portion as much as we possibly can. Doing something for ourselves will sometimes be the greatest unselfishness.

This teaching the Country Girl should take to heart. It is her duty to recognize the great value of her physical vigor to the life of her realm, and to do all in her power to conserve it and to increase it. She should think of this not only because she is of tremendous importance in the home of to-day and because its happiness depends in large measure upon her buoyancy and cheer and hopefulness, which may so easily be increased or diminished by her physical state, but also because she has so great a part in bearing the torch of life to another generation. Let me repeat the words—it is her duty; and again, and yet again let me say it—it is a duty!

It is a duty to exercise every part of the body, the hands, the wrist, the fingers, each finger! Every part of the body has a function and should be prepared for its uses. The lifting muscles, the straightening muscles, the apparatus that pulls and that pushes, that bends and that twists; the machinery for stepping with vibrancy, for going uphill, for going downhill, for walking on the grass, on irregular stony paths, on cement walks; every kind of movement has its special apparatus in this wondrously varied human body and all should be developed and rounded into perfection.

Housework affords a training for more of the body's needs than perhaps any other occupation. The household administrator has an advantage there, and the physical vigor of women in this country ought to increase as they more and more have the opportunity to take up this work in their homes. Probably when every house in the country has mechanical appliances so that there will be enough work in the household and not too much, the health of the nation will increase by leaps and bounds.

At present housework, especially in the country, affords wearying labor which is not so well adapted to the development of physical strength as it might be because it is not systematic. Certain parts of the body are overexercised and certain parts are neglected. The result is frequently a body with a semblance of strength but with, as you might say, strands of weakness, rendering it liable to fall at the least onslaught of infection or unusual strain. These lacks should be made up for by consistently arranged exercises, by carefully studied diet, and by proper sleeping plans, so that there may be rightly developed muscular force—not too much and yet enough; so that there may be perfect circulation; fat enough and not too much; and that there may be a full supply of energy. If the young woman is vain enough to wish not to be portly when she is forty, she must not wait till she is forty-five to go to work at it; she should begin at twenty to train for that special form of beauty; if she does this she will soon express it in trimness, in an energetic and graceful step, in the exact curve of the spinal column at the small of the back, the right lift of the chest beneath the neck, and the perfect position of chin, elbows, shoulder blades, hips, feet, and all the parts of the body, for walking, sitting, standing, running, sleeping, and for every possible activity. Beauty is a thing to be valued and worked for; but a greater motive for the attention necessary to the full development of our physical powers is that we should be able to give to our children the greatest allotment of beauty and vigor that we can possibly command.

Miss Goldmark in her valuable study, Fatigue and Efficiency, says that the results of overstrain in the labor of women are manifest in a heightened infant mortality, in a lowered birth rate, and in an impaired second generation. We should take this to heart. Not to make a struggle to increase our store of vigor for the sake of the children that are to be is to do them a great wrong.

For girls under twenty the responsibility of the mother is greater because so much depends upon the establishment of the daughter's health during these earlier years. But girls themselves should take it upon their own responsibility to a large extent also. In the appendix to this volume will be found a bibliography where among the works published by the Young Women's Christian Association, the girl may find some that will answer many questions that perhaps have puzzled her in the period of swift growth between fifteen and twenty.

Every mother should be in her daughter's confidence in regard to all questions of health and physical well-being. And now and then the father should stand his daughters up in a row before him, look them over, and see for himself whether they are sound, blooming, well developed and rosy. Do their chests stand up good and strong? Is the chin well down and back? Are the shoulders well back? Can they take full, deep, long breaths? If they were set back against the wall, would the hips be close to the wall, the shoulder blades nearly flat against the wall and would the girls be perfectly comfortable in that position? And can they then walk off, holding the frame in this way, and keep the position firmly and gracefully? How hard can they hit, how fast can they run, how high can they jump, how much can they lift, how free are they from pain, and how happy are they? If the answers to these questions are not satisfactory, that farmer's crop of humanity does not take a prize! And he should try to know the reason why. It is not a lightning streak of divine disfavor that has destroyed this crop. It is just as impossible that a woman should have a beautiful child if she has been the victim of overstrain for ten years before that child is born, as it would be to get a good crop from absolutely untilled ground. The home is the field for the harvest of children. That ground must be cultivated as carefully and assiduously as any other, or the harvest will bring no honor to the family.

If the young girls in the farmstead do not measure up to the standard, will they try to do what is in their power to make themselves more strong, fit, and beautiful? It will take six weeks of hard, unremitting work, by night and day and every hour in the day, to turn a round-shouldered girl into a well-shaped, straight-shouldered, elastic figure. Is it worth while? The result will be a girl with better breathing capacity, more vigor, more beautiful carriage, and in every way better prepared for a happy life. There are some wrongs that are done to the young people by neglect of the laws of health that never can be made up to them. But there is much that can be done, and perhaps it is not too late to correct some errors and to make up for some losses. Health conditions on many farms are not up to the mark and among the causes of this the Report of the Commission on Country Life mentions the too long hours of work. There are of course other causes. Three meals a day of pork and bread, seven days in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year, year in and year out the same, will never produce blooming youngsters, especially if we are speaking of the delicate constitutions of girls. Nor will bedrooms hermetically sealed from air during half of the breathing time, favor development of lung-capacity.

Theoretically, the farm should be the most healthful place for the growth of human beings; and wherever sanitary conveniences are installed, health conditions need no betterment. The point is not that the rural people have declined from a former better condition, but that they have not gone forward so fast as they might. While the residents of cities have at the command of new science been making swift progress in sanitation, working vigorously on the problems of pure food, good water, the suppression of tuberculosis, pellagra and other diseases, the country people have not so swiftly answered the call.

Such movements as, for instance, the one to provide pure milk for babies, lower the death rate in the cities, while the health rate in the country has not shown a corresponding rise. This is simply because the country towns have not waked to the importance of these endeavors toward betterment. The country may be the home of abounding physical vigor; but many an unsanitary farmstead and many an unregenerated village is still in a decidedly unmoral state of ill-health.

In this matter a recent investigation in New York State has aroused serious apprehension. Statistics were made public showing that the death rate in so-called rural districts was increasing as compared with that of the large city, New York, the conclusion being that the country would have to give up its world-old claim to being a supremely healthful place to live.

If, however, we look into the matter more closely, we may find a ray of hope. The investigation included under the word "rural" towns of over eight thousand inhabitants, the division being no doubt made because of the fact that the United States reports were, up to 1810, made on a like basis, and other statistics could be more conveniently compared if these were included. But the census of 1910 makes the word "rural" cover towns and villages of 2500 and under, and what we understand by rural conditions pertains to this smaller grouping. The larger grouping includes a number of towns that are manufacturing in character, that sometimes contain a large foreign element, that have the beginnings of congestion without the open air to offset them, and that have notoriously not followed in the steps of the larger cities in sanitation. Thus these very unrural towns bring down the average.

We feel, then, that we have a right to take heart of grace and tell ourselves that the open country is as good for health as it ever was. Moreover, farm houses are rapidly acquiring the principal appliances for sanitation. The wells are being looked out for and the pure condition of the water supply being insured from contagion; and the level of education in regard to sanitation is being rapidly lifted. At present, the small towns and the larger villages are about on a par in regard to indifference to the laws of health, and to the necessity for framing new ones to meet new demands. But in the smaller villages and in the open country the necessity is not so pressing because the congestion has not been so immediate as to cause depression of the death rate there.

Therefore we may say that the girl who is born in the open country or in the small village is more likely, all other things being equal, to keep her hold upon life than any other girl in the land.

It is said that sixty per cent. of the school children in the country suffer from removable physical defects. The countryside has its share of these. Fortunately for girls, life force is more persistent with them than with boys, and women are longer-lived than men.

Sometimes fate deprives the home of the mother, and then heavy burdens fall to the daughter, too heavy for her young and undeveloped body. It is then that the young girl feels the necessity for a better understanding of her physical needs. Wanting this, life-long suffering may be the result of undertaking severe labor ere yet her health is thoroughly established or her maximum growth has been gained.

There is much, then, for every young woman on the farm both to study and to practise. The following code of rules is suggested as an aid and as a reminder:

Code of Rules for Maintaining Health

Bodily carriage

Exercise

Correct breathing

Clothing

Food and eating

Elimination of waste

Cleanliness

Amount of sleep

Rest

Prevention of illness or of a depressed state of health

CHAPTER XVI

"To preserve as things above all price
The old domestic morals of the land,
Her simple manners and her stable worth
That dignified and cheered a low estate,
... the character of peace,
Sobriety, and order, and chaste love,
And honest dealing, and untainted speech,
And pure good-will, and hospitable cheer;
That made the very thought of country life
A thought of refuge, for a mind detained
Reluctantly amid the bustling crowd."

Wordsworth.

CHAPTER XVI

THE COUNTRY GIRL'S WAGE

A vision had certainly visited the soul of a certain fifteen-year-old Country Girl of New York State who claimed that the girls of the present day have a progressive spirit, and that if this spirit of progress is not found on the farm, they will seek it in the city. The bearing of this spirit on the question of the Country Girl's wage has made her think more deeply and feel more keenly than words can express. She cannot resist the conclusion that unless the young people are paid definite wages for the work they do on the farm, it will not seem to them that they are getting on so well as they might in a city office. This is a delicate diagnosis of a very painful trouble.

Many of the girls realize that the tenure of industry in the city is light for the person that comes unprepared for it; many realize that the dangers are thickly set about her path; many know well that the lure of the city is to be valiantly resisted; but the majority, being but little accustomed to the handling of money, and having sadly little instruction as to real values, cannot see why eight dollars a week gained in some city industry does not represent a fortune. In making her budget at home the cost of rental and food have not been taken into account, and she has never been made to realize what these items mean in the new environment. Parents and teachers and ministers and all sober people in the farming community are cruelly to blame for the ineptitude of their neglect in leaving these things unimpressed upon the mind of the young women in the community and for not watching out for the strangers who may fill their minds with glowing descriptions not founded on fact about the abundant opportunity and the free and enjoyable life to be found in the walks of city work and play. "Let the child earn money, have money, spend money, save money," advised a country mother; and if this were done, wisely and all the time, from earliest years up, the boys and girls would not come to the age of question and desire with so little preparation for its responsibilities.

From a wide correspondence with Country Girls in many parts of America, the conclusion is forced upon us that very few of them, even when mature and hard-working young women, are receiving definite pay for their service to the household. They are doing a wage-worthy work but they are not paid for it. Instead the fathers think their duty is done when they give to the daughters as a benevolence what they, the fathers, think the daughters should have for their needs and pleasures. Meantime there is a new thing under the sun, namely, an awakening of the desire for economic independence in the soul of woman, and the younger women on the farms are partaking of this spirit. Result, the cityward procession! Some medieval daughters have not heard of this new spirit, but they will hear of it and they also will be stirred with a divine discontent.

Many girls gain time and permission to enter into some earning work outside of the home. The money that they thus gain they generally feel that they may lay claim to and use it as they think best. At any rate, the fear that it will not be understood that they do have what they earn leads them sometimes to emphasize the fact that they do positively consider what they earn outside of the home as their very own. Public opinion is ahead of law in this respect. A father who took legal means to take the earnings of a son under age, was quietly told that the village would be too small for him hereafter. Perhaps we have not come to the point where this would invariably happen in the case of a daughter.

The daughter as she grows up should have a reasonable sum of money to spend as she likes; this is essential as a matter of education, to prepare her for the responsibilities that are to be hers as one of the great body of spenders. She should grow up with a fully trained power to spend money wisely. And when she becomes mature, if she is strong enough to do a full-grown woman's work, she should have her self-respect educated and cultivated by receiving the sum of money that would be her fair wage if she were not a member of the family. Moreover, a father may attach his children to himself in a very real and spontaneous service, if he will allow each child, including the daughters, to be responsible for some part of the farm business, to own a piece of land or some of the livestock, and to control the produce thereof. This will be the best way to train them not only to understand the problems of the farm but to feel that interest that comes only through possession and responsibility. The daughter will be as keenly responsive under this method as the son.

Dr. Anna Howard Shaw in a recent address made a good point. It was in effect something like this: She said that if the farmer gave his son a colt, not a scrub colt but one of the very best on the farm to be all his own and to do with as he chose, that colt would tie the boy to the farm as nothing else could unless it was a share of the farm itself. The same, she said, was true in regard to the girl who went out to milk the cows because that was part of her duty, without having any heart or interest in the result of the milking; but if she were given a cow, one of the best of the herd as her own, she would not only be interested in the milking of that one, but all the cows she milked would give more milk—she would do all her work better because of the interest she took in the work.

This is not saying that either the girls or the boys are unconscientious in their work and will not do well unless they have a selfish motive; it is only to say that they are human beings and all the more like grown-up people. Dr. Shaw added as her opinion that the ownership of the boy and girl should not end merely with the colt and the cow. Each year they should feel that a certain percentage of the net profits of the work should belong to them, and that they were having a chance to accumulate, even though it was only a very small part of the income a year.

"If I had a farm and had sons and daughters on it," said Dr. Shaw, "I would sit down and discuss the whole matter of the work of the farm with them, and agree upon a certain share of the net and then let each one have his or her share, and encourage them to invest it, but leave them free to use their own judgment as to the investment. Until something of this sort is done, I am afraid that the boys and girls more and more will turn from the farm to the city; and who can well blame them, even though it costs them more to live in the city than they can make? Sometimes one feels happier in spending every dollar he has merely to live, if he is free to spend it as he wishes, than he would to save if he were not free."

This wisdom may sound a little Utopian, at any rate as far as Country Girls are concerned. Very few girls are assigned any pecuniary share in the farm. Now and then one remembers that she once had several calves that were "called" her own; but she does not remember ever receiving any money from that stock. A mother will share the precious egg-money with the daughter. One girl confessed to owning a tree, and one a canary. Another mentioned as her pecuniary share in the farm the fact that she helped milk! Nearly all would agree with Dr. Shaw that having a share in the ownership would make them more enthusiastic for the success of the farm.

If the young woman in the farmstead would be more systematic in the use of what money she can command, perhaps she would the sooner be trusted with greater financial responsibility. It certainly is a motive in many parental minds that the children—they still seem to be children in the thoughts of some parents even when they have reached years of discretion—are not wise enough to use money discretely. Often they are not, but whose fault is it? If children were trained in the use of money from childhood up, they would not be so foolish when the time comes for putting this discipline into practise. Parents should remember that they are sure to wish some time to have a wise, careful son to lean upon. Then they will wish they had trained the child properly. The same is true of the daughter. There is nothing more certain than that the daughters in the wide countryside are being brought up in the main with very little inkling of business. Now any girl that has gone as far in her education as to spell and to compute fractions is quite far enough to be taught the meaning of a deed. And not long after that she should know the force of the little word "warranty" or "full covenant" or "quitclaim" written before the word "deed." She should understand something of the meaning of the fell term "mortgage "—something besides the fact that when it is mentioned everybody is expected to weep. If young women grew up with a more common-sense attitude toward this vital subject, the word would be robbed of some, at least, of its terrors. In just a few years those young women will be the distributors of the income for a whole family; they are to be the conservators of the saving for the fatal day of interest-paying. If they understood more of the practical working of the matter, the saving would be approached with less dismay.

Does it not seem reasonable to suppose that if a girl is made to see the relation of "overhead charges" to the "cost of living," if she has been taken into family confidence with regard to the business of the farm, and has been made to understand the difference between the basis for a girl's wages in town and that in the farm home, she will not run away under a fatal misunderstanding of conditions there?

Moreover the girl of to-day is to be the home-conserver of to-morrow. Since the woman is the fore-ordained overseer of the whole business of spending, we may say that her failure to save and to plan and to adapt, has been the cause of all our trouble. It makes no difference to the women of the countryside that the women of the cities are more culpable in these things than are they; their affair is their own, and their duty is to attain not some one else's ideal, but their own.

The model home-conserver will have the budget for the year put into shape; she will know all the items of rent, interest on mortgages (if the family are so unfortunate as to have these troublesome things to look after), the dates when the fatal inroad has to be made into the cherished store of savings, the days when the various taxes are due—the inheritance, county, village, water and other special taxes—and all other payments that belong in the system of support that the farm or village home requires. She must know that the thing to be aspired to and looked forward to is that at the end of the year the financial income and outgo should accurately balance. The young woman who neglects her own small account will not be preparing herself for these larger responsibilities; and she must be able to make this small one balance if she expects to do the same with the greater one. The comfort of having it come out right once will be an incentive ever after; and the effect upon character of compelling one's self to keep steadily to the task of mental accuracy, of remembering each item and of putting it down quickly before it has escaped, will be incalculable. It is not a matter of mere idiosyncrasy that a young girl may say, "Oh, I cannot keep my accounts and make them come out right—it's too much trouble for just me!" To have to confess this should be considered a disgrace. One should conceal the disinclination to this duty, as one should conceal a disinclination to give one's hair the thorough weekly washing which that passion for cleanness that is the mark of the true lady calls for. It is impossible for a young girl of right instincts to say, "Oh, I would just as lief be an unclean person!" So it should be impossible for the young girl of right feeling to say, "Oh, I would willingly be a lazy, ineffective and partly dishonest person in my understanding of business!"—for slackness and inaccuracy in business are the next door to dishonesty. In all finances, to the remotest penny, the rightly constituted girl will be accurate. If necessity compels her to borrow a small sum, she will repay it at the earliest possible moment.

It is not the mark of a fine woman to be careless in spending; quite the contrary. The young woman who has intellectuality and training and taste to compute her expenses carefully, to use the money to good advantage and to the best purpose, is the young woman of higher grade, not the one who wastes, who scatters carelessly and purposelessly, and who indulges in things costing much and affording no permanent good. Our ideal in these respects needs some right-about-face orders from our conscience. "Saving," says Professor Martha Van Rensselaer at Cornell University, "cultivates self-control, imagination, resourcefulness, character." She continues: "It is quite right to economize on some standbys and then spend more for some esthetic object, if the esthetic better satisfies a real craving connected with the higher life.... It is not meanness to study economy; it is not 'near' to avoid waste. To work out new uses that may be made of every particle of food, to get the full food-value out of every bit of it, is scientific exactness instead."

It is possible that all the skill of the woman in the farm home will be needed as time goes on to keep the financial foundations of the farmstead firm. A long look forward seems to discern on the horizon a rising necessity for greater care, and perhaps for all the skill that the farm women and other women of the next generation can master. Why should Nature go on interminably caring for a people who indulge themselves so heedlessly, so criminally in waste, cutting away their forests, throwing away good food, refusing to use the supplies of electric power in their rivers? Of course she will not. Disciplines are before us. It is the part of wisdom to use greater stringency and more scientific exactness in our household systems, that disaster may not come upon us unprepared.

Some prevision of this may be in the minds of women when they endeavor to give themselves a bit of training for direct money-earning business. For them, and especially the younger women, openings are being made in almost every direction. A woman is no longer to be accused of a tastelessly commercial spirit if she desires to know through actual experiment the value of her labor in the commercial rating of the community. It is only by trying that she can thus standardize her labor. If she offers cabbage plants from her growing patch, honey from her bee-colonies, wild fruit that she has gathered from God's free gardens, if she takes boarders, weaves hair, embroiders, or mends, if she takes advantage of postal service and builds up a business in fine lace-laundering, or silk and lingerie waist cleansing, whatever she takes in hand, she is not only earning a little money, but she has gained skill in manipulation, developed taste, compelled herself to seek excellence, and strengthened her character by putting her work—and that means herself—to the test of comparison with the work of others to stand or fall by the decision. If she has failed in this test, she has the chance to try harder and gain more character in further struggle.

All this should be looked upon as a part of the girl's training for life. When parents have presented to the human family a highly developed and trained young woman as their contribution, they should expect her to desire to be a worker and to take up some form of activity as the beginning, in turn, of her personal contribution. Professor Nearing says that every girl should occupy the years between the latest school days and her marriage in some wage-earning pursuit. There should be two or three years there that she could spend in this part of her education. She should thus learn business law, the stringency of markets, the balance of purchase and sale, the interchange of commercial motive, and the art of salesmanship. Here will be a great field of training for her, and every part of it will be useful to her when she enters upon the duties of her own house and home.

The best way for any girl to start upon this means of discipline, is to think over what she can already do well. What have you been praised for doing? Take that and try to do it still better. What you best like to do will be the easiest to start with. Do this so well that people will desire the product. People buy what they think is most excellent: therefore make something so excellent that people will want to buy it. And remember this principle: the appearance of anything offered for sale has a great deal to do with whether people will take a liking to it or not. Do up all things nicely; make all packages neat and shipshape; use color if possible; have the box and the cord match in tint; humor the fancy of the buyer. At a certain country fair the girls in one particular booth had great success. Why? Their voices were sweet and they themselves were neatly dressed. But above all, the packages were done up so deftly and looked so beautiful when they were handed out that it was not difficult to understand the success of this booth. Buyers want a good product, but they do like it in a fine package.