ly
restricted longings, the desire for companionship, suppressed for years
and accumulated unbearably.

The memory of that quarter of an hour with Cousin Artemisia has driven
it home to me that the young woman in the solitary farm house wants and
needs the means of self-expression as much as little Helen Keller needed
the means to reveal herself that would take the place of the hearing and
speaking and seeing that had been denied her. What would have happened
to her if she had not had gateways opened to her mind and soul so that
she could give out and receive, is what happens to all of us unless we
have our powers developed by contact with others and by giving and
taking intellectual and spiritual goods. Dumbness is a hindrance to
growth. Excessive shyness and secrecy, bashfulness, a spirit of
seclusion, sensitiveness, and other faults that attack young people in
the growing years, are a result of the lack of the liberalizing and
purifying ministry of companionship and they are an inhibition of
development.

An account by a rural school-teacher presents a picture that is
gruesome, and any one that wishes may omit it from the reading; but it
suggests a possibility and drives home a lesson. Circumstances required
her for a time, she said, to take care of an old lady, who lived with
her husband and daughter on a lonely farm. All that they had in the
house were the old things the mother had kept house with forty years
ago. The chairs had been scrubbed till not a particle of paint was left;
and their meals were alike three times a day--pork, potatoes and bread.
Not a book was there to read except a few old school books and the
Bible. The young woman who tells the story stayed a week, and it was the
longest week she ever spent. The farmer's daughter was about eighteen
years old. She seemed a bright young girl; but two years after that,
while the father was gone to the factory, she hung herself in the barn.
The school-teacher did not wonder; she said that if she had had to live
in such a house, life would have been a burden.

Of course that is an extreme case. The suicide rate is higher for the
city than it is for the country; it is higher for men than it is for
women; the proportion of suicides over sixty-five years of age is
greater for rural districts in our country than it is for cities. This
may not especially interest the young woman on the farm; but it concerns
us to see that all the younger people should have the na