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 vigor 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 make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief
that they were "refined," and that the country girls, who "worked out,"
were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as
their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with
little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had
borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the
Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters
go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they
sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get
positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the
language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from
debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after
they came to town, remained as serious a