o, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the
elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago.
Large parts of what was once the home are now spread out through the
community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its
activities and opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a
course is nothing but home training for the enlarged home.

But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest
department of all in the old homes of New England.

"Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindly that they may live,"

said Chaucer in a teasing mood.

But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles. We
forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department
offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:

First. In the Subdepartment of Flax, after heckling the flax with
combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty
straight, after spinning it into yarn on her spinning wheel, after
reeling the yarn off into skeins, after "bucking" the skeins in hot
lye through many changes of water, and after using shuttle and loom to
weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to
accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing,
possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.

Second. In the Subdepartment of Wool, in addition to being carders,
spinners, and weavers, women were dyers, handling all the color
resources of the times, boiling pokeberries in alum to get a crimson,
using sassafras for a yellow or an orange, and producing a black by
boiling the fabric with field sorrel and then boiling it again with
logwood and copperas.

We pass over, as trivial, the making of flax and wool stuffs into
articles of actual use. We say nothing about the transformation of
cloth into clothes, table-covers, napkins; nothing about the weaving
of yarn on little lap looms into narrow fabrics used for hair laces,
glove ties, belts, garters, and hatbands; nothing about the incessant
knitting of yarn into mittens and stockings. Those details were for
idle moments.

Sweet domestic days, when girls stayed at home and helped their
mothers and let father support the family!

It seems as if even Rip Van Winkle, in his most shiftless mood, ought
to have been able to support a large number of daughters under such
conditions.

Does it astonish you that they matured young? There, all about them,
f