nd 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, erelong, 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 shop-worn
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 with here than elsewhere, would afford happiness
enough. Her eyes would not grow dim, nor her cheeks sunken, in the
absence of parties, morning visits, and milliners' shops.

As to music, I wish I could see in such places the guitar rather than
the piano, and good vocal more than instrumental music.

The piano many carry with them, because it is the fashionable
instrument in the Eastern cities. Even there, it is s