itorial

[Illustration]

In Germany the government maintains a system of education in what is
called intensive farming. Through instructors who go about the country,
the farmers are taught how to get a bigger yield from the same area of
soil. The work of these wonderful teachers is supplemented by women
domestic science teachers who in the same manner visit the homes in
their districts and instruct the good _Haus Frau_ on how to improve,
economize, and systematize in kitchen and household work.

The manner in which these women instruct is, I am sure, of especial
interest to the Cook Book readers, inasmuch as the method is in a way
practically the same as what the Cook Book is doing. Where they teach by
hand and mouth the Cook Book has taught through its exchange of ideas,
contest stories, and recipe contests, the object being the same in both
cases that of instruction, education and economy in the kitchen and
saving of steps in the housework.

It is truly said of Germans that they are the most frugal and economical
of all people. In the past the usual method has been to exert this
frugality with what is already on hand in the larder left-overs, so to
speak. One point of the modern instruction of these wandering domestic
science teachers, as they go from home to home, is to show the economy
of systematic buying of groceries, meats and vegetables. Where the
practice in the past has been to buy a little, so there is not much
expenditure of money, German housewives are now taught the economy of
buying in bulk, because it is cheaper, and there is never any waste of
food in a German home, no matter how much of it there may be on hand.

Neither is there any good reason why there should be any waste of food
in an American home. Economy or frugality comes from knowing how, and
not from any stingy purpose, as some ill-advised people think.

The methods of these teachers show that this wonderful nation is alive
to the fact that the high cost of living is in our own waste and
carelessness, that oftentimes we do not make the most of what we have or
what we are given to do with.

[Illustration: Mary Jane McClure]

The Sweet Places

_I want to go back to the sweet mysterious places,
The crook in the creek-bed nobody knew but me,
Where the roots in the bank thrust out strange knotty faces,
Scaring the squirrels who stole there timidly._

_I want to lie under the corn and hear it rustle,