The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Girl Scouts: A Training School for
Womanhood, by Kate Douglas Wiggin

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Girl Scouts: A Training School for Womanhood

Author: Kate Douglas Wiggin

Release Date: June 26, 2009 [EBook #29253]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GIRL SCOUTS: TRAINING SCHOOL ***

Produced by David Edwards, Marcia Brooks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was made using scans of public domain works put online
by Harvard University Library\\\'s Open Collections Program,
Women Working 1800 - 1930)

THE GIRL SCOUTS

_A Training School for
Womanhood_

By KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN

[Illustration]

Series No. 11

GIRL SCOUTS NATIONAL HEADQUARTERS
189 Lexington Avenue
New York City

A Training School for Womanhood

_By Kate Douglas Wiggin_

I am heartily interested in the Girl Scouts of America. The fact is, I
think I was always a Girl Scout myself (although the name was unknown);
yes, from the very beginning. Even my first youthful story was "scouty"
in tone, if I may invent a word. Then for a few years afterward, when I
was "scoutingly" busy educating little street Arabs in San Francisco, I
wrote books, too, for and about younger children, but there came a time
when "Polly Oliver's Problem" brought me a girl public. It was not an
oppressively large one; that is, I never was mobbed in the streets by
Polly's admirers, but they existed, and Heavens! how many letters they
wrote!

I see now that "Polly" was a real girl scout, but faithful as she
unconsciously was to the then unwritten laws of the sisterhood, she
faded into insignificance when my absolutely true-to-type Scout appeared
in the guise of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Rebecca did not reform,
convert or uplift her seniors, her parents, grandparents, neighbors and
constituents, but she could never keep her hands off things that needed
to be done, and whatever enterprise was on hand there was Rebecca to be
found--sometimes on the outskirts, frequently, I fear, in its storm
centre.

Do you remember that it was Rebecca and her twelve-year-old friends who