fearful
and she lacks the energy for the leap. There remains for her only a
martyr's crown and a harp.

The most isolated farm woman in the country of half a century old must
have been touched by the edges at least of the wave of progress in
social and home-making conditions that has swept through our life in
late decades. Most of the dwellers on farms as well as townspeople have
been profoundly moved thereby. Some strange new kind of utensil drifting
to the remotest mountain valley and appearing in some neglected
despairing kitchen, like a bit of flotsam floating across seas from
richer lands, was a symbol of a reorganization as undreamed of as heaven
will be found to our awakening eyes. That utensil was the call of a new
era. The isolated farm wife may not have had her ears opened to know the
sound, but that was what it was, for all that. It represented a new
life, the making over of a whole generation.

Naturally the younger people are a part of this new life; naturally the
difference between the wants of the older people and the wants of the
younger makes a cleavage between them. The more swift the change, the
greater the difference between the people of the two ranges of family
relationship. This is the all-sufficient reason for the frequency of
differences between the young men and young women of this period and
their parents. In the country these differences have appeared with less
frequency because the progress in those parts has been less spasmodic,
more normal, more natural. This has been at least one good effect of the
slowness of the countryside to take up with the new ideas. But the
progress there has been fully swift enough to make a distinct division
between old and young, and this division, the result of perfectly
natural influences that do not by any means belong to the country alone,
has been one of the causes why the young men and the young women have
drifted away to the city.

A better way would be to stay and work out the problem. It would be
wiser for the older and younger to attack it together as one. As for the
Country Girl, we are far from suggesting a separation between the
motherly and the daughterly ideals. We would wish rather to pour
greater tenderness into the relationship, already one of the dearest of
human ties. Said one noble-hearted man, after giving a full description
of the work of his mother under the old regime with soap-making, dyeing,
spinning, and candle-making, "Do we want