of rattlesnakes!

Seeing much of this joylessness, and inaptitude, both of body and mind,
for a lot which would be full of blessings for those prepared for it, we
could not but look with deep interest on the little girls, and hope they
would grow up with the strength of body, dexterity, simple tastes, and
resources that would fit them to enjoy and refine the western farmer's
life.

But they have a great deal to war with in the habits of thought acquired
by their mothers from their own early life. Everywhere the fatal spirit
of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates, and
threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

If the little girls grow up strong, resolute, able to exert their
faculties, their mothers mourn over their want of fashionable delicacy.
Are they gay, enterprising, ready to fly about in the various ways that
teach them so much, these ladies lament that "they cannot go to school,
where they might learn to be quiet." They lament the want of "education"
for their daughters, as if the thousand needs which call out their young
energies, and the language of nature around, yielded no education.

Their grand ambition for their children, is to send them to school in
some eastern city, the measure most likely to make them useless and
unhappy at home. I earnestly hope that, ere long, the existence of good
schools near themselves, planned by persons of sufficient thought to
meet the wants of the place and time, instead of copying New York or
Boston, will correct this mania. Instruction the children want to enable
them to profit by the great natural advantages of their position; but
methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta, are as
ill suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer, as satin shoes to
climb the Indian mounds. An elegance she would diffuse around her, if
her mind were opened to appreciate elegance; it might be of a kind new,
original, enchanting, as different from that of the city belle as that
of the prairie torch-flower from the shopworn article that touches the
cheek of that lady within her bonnet.

To a girl really skilled to make home beautiful and comfortable, with
bodily strength to enjoy plenty of exercise, the woods, the streams, a
few studies, music, and the sincere and familiar intercourse, far more
easily to be met here than elsewhere, would afford happiness enough. Her
eyes would not grow dim, nor her cheeks sunken, in the abs