m farms eight and ten miles away, and
all the country girls were on the floor--Antonia and Lena and Tiny, and
the Danish laundry girls and their friends. I was not the only boy who
found these dances gayer than the others. The young men who belonged to
the Progressive Euchre Club used to drop in late and risk a tiff with
their sweethearts and general condemnation for a waltz with 'the hired
girls.'

IX

THERE WAS A CURIOUS social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men
felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come
to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father
struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of
the family to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got
little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for
whom they made such sacrifices and who have had 'advantages,' never seem
to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated.
The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much
from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had
all, like Antonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a
tender age from an old country to a new.

I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service
in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember
something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were
almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour which,
when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into
a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous
among Black Hawk women.

That was before the day of high-school athletics. Girls who had to
walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a
tennis-court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant
for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the high-school girls
were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of
the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them,
their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to
ask but one thing--not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely
as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off
below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the
high desks that were surely put there to ma