these, and lo! all of these, objections to it, she would be
perfectly content and satisfied to live on the farm all her days; but as
it is, well, she can only join that funeral procession of the nation
cityward.

It is true that the Country Girl does not enjoy a house with no music
under its roof-tree, a house where no games are played, where no stories
are told or read about the lamp in the long winter evenings: a house, in
short, with nothing she calls happiness in it; but this is a small part
of her indictment.

She does not enjoy trudging back and forth a million times a year over
the same square yards of floor-space; but that, too, is immaterial to
her. In fine, she does not object to the work itself, but she cannot
endure that heterogeneous, unsystematized, objectless drudgery, the
enforced character of the toil, the out-of-date methods, the absence of
acknowledgment of any economic value in her contribution to the
business--this is what grinds her soul.

She is not wanting in appreciation of the possibilities in farm life and
the farming business; but, to quote with variations, she says to
herself:

If they be not fair for me,
What care I how fair they be?

She sees the beauty of the changing seasons, and she enjoys the
companionship of animals, naming them one by one after all her favorite
heroes and heroines of fairyland; but the fact that she has nor chick
nor lambkin for her own is as

The little rift within the lute
That by and by will make the music mute.

[Illustration: The Country Girl takes a pride in her chickens that makes
their care a pleasure to her.]

If the struggle to pay the mortgage is long and the work heavy, she does
not especially enjoy spending days and nights of toil with the rest of
the family to accomplish the desired end; but more than all this does
she dislike having the father keep all the trouble to himself; she wants
a share in the responsibility. She wants some acres of her own, some
stock of her own. She wants her personality as a factor in the business,
which it really is, to be justly acknowledged. For without that, she
reasons, what is there to look forward to? Hope is the anchor of the
soul; and without something to hope for, how can one hope? She finds
that she has none of these joyous anticipations of the future that every
young woman loves and has the right to entertain. She cannot look
forward to the natural and normal life of the home for her future lot,