to return to those good old
times? Not by any means! My greatest regret is that my mother could not
have lived to have some of the luxuries of the present era." This is the
right spirit. And the young woman who brings her thoughts to her mother
with the brand of the later era upon them, must remember that she is
carrying out the spirit, if not the letter, of her mother's life and
character, her cleverness and her patience, her adaptation to
circumstances and her tact and perseverance, when she takes the result
of her mother's work and carries it a step farther, adapting her hands
to the use of the tools that her time provides, even as her mother did
in using the tools of her own time and station a half-century ago, when
she exchanged her tallow dip for the kerosene lamp, her fireplace and
crane for the cast-iron stove.

CHAPTER X

THE HOMESTEADER

What man would live coffined with brick and stone,
Imprisoned from the influences of air
And cramped with selfish landmarks everywhere,
When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone,
The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?

What man would read and read the selfsame faces,
And, like the marbles which the wind-mill grinds,
Rub smooth forever with the same smooth minds,
This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull traces,
When there are woods and un-man-stifled places?

_Lowell._

CHAPTER X

THE HOMESTEADER

In 1777 the famous ladies of Litchfield molded delicately the leaden
statue of King George into bullets that their husbands might have the
wherewithal to fight King George's men. To this day there stands along
the edges of the West many a shack with chunks of lead imbedded in its
walls where women still live who defended themselves there using bullets
they also molded, not a century, but just a few decades ago. The
pioneering era is with us still.

"Over vast expanses of America," says Dr. Albert Shaw, "the log-cabin
period still continues." And if the log-cabin is found--or the tar-paper
shack, or the sod-wall house, or the dug-out, or whatever device stands
as an apology for a dwelling place while the claim is being "proved
up"--then also the dolorous conditions of isolation and struggle, of
overwork and wearing out and all that follows as a reprisal by fate for
the inroad into a new world, are matters of present day experience.

There are unirrigated deserts where women wear out their lives in
despairing