eturns in
home baking, in canning fruit and vegetables, or in mending, making
simple clothes for little children, or in making buttonholes and doing
other "finishing work" for busy housewives. Work of these sorts,
undertaken in a small way, has often assumed the proportions of a
business, requiring all of a young woman's time and paying her quite
as well as and often better than less interesting work in shop or
factory. A girl of my acquaintance earns a comfortable living at home
with her crochet needle. Another has paid her way through high school
and college by raising sweet peas.

The untrained girl who loves an outdoor life has fewer opportunities
than other girls unless she is capable of independent work. If she is
capable of this and has sufficient ability to study her work,
gardening and poultry or bee culture may open the way for her to work
and be happy. School gardens, poultry clubs, and canning clubs have
shown many a girl what she may do in these ways.

[Illustration: Courtesy of U.S. Department of Agriculture
Some girls have built up a good business canning fruits and
vegetables at home]

Many times too little is realized of the possibilities of these
grammar-school girls who are crowded by necessity into the working
ranks. We cannot shirk our responsibilities in regard to them,
however, although they escape from our school systems and bravely take
up the burden of their own lives. Quite as many of these girls as of
more favored ones will marry and be among the mothers of the next
generation. The work they do in the interval between school and home
will leave its impress even more strongly than upon the girl whose
school life lasts longer and who is therefore older as well as better
equipped when she enters upon her work. Few of these younger girls in
times past can be said to have done anything other than drift into
work which would make or spoil their lives and perhaps those of their
children after them. It is well that the responsibility of the school
toward them is being recognized and met.

[Illustration: A prosperous poultry farm. Poultry farming opens the
way for the girl who loves an outdoor life to work in the open and be
happy]

A distinct duty of the grammar-school teacher is to make known the
facts concerning short cuts for grammar-school girls to office work.
Unscrupulous business "colleges" sometimes mislead these immature
girls into believing that a short course taken in their school w