380 MISSOURI STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Gardening for ladies. 



The German, Flemish and Dutch women, who help husband or 

 father in his fields are strong, hardy women who rear a stalwart race. 

 Half the fine ladies who now find a few turns on a piazza almost too 

 much for them, would be all the better for a graduated scale of garden 

 work. Beginning with a quarter of an hour a day, they should find 

 at the close of a month that they could easily do their two hours, and 

 that they ate and slept as they never had done before, while they for- 

 got that such evils as blue devils and nerves ever had any existence. — 

 English Parliamentary Report. 



France has agricultural schools for girls. One of the chief is near 

 Rouen, which has 300 girls from six to eighteen. The farm has over 

 400 acres. Twenty-five sisters are the teachers. The pupils are in 

 great demand on account of their skill as stewards, gardeners, farm 

 managers, dairy women and laundresses. Each girl has, on leaving, 

 an outfit and a small sum of money, earned in spare hours. If they 

 want a home, they can always return to Darnetel, which they are 

 taught to regard as home. 



real agriculture. 



Mr. A.. W. Cheever, well known as a sound and practical agricul- 

 tural writer, recently said in discussing his reasons for choosing the 

 profession of a farmer, " If beginning a business life again, with our 

 present feelings, we should select some kind of farming, and would not 

 go out of New England for it, either." There is a year's ration of 

 *'food for reflection" in this statement. Mr. Cheever frankly states 

 that farming is not without its drawbacks. Socially the farmer is be- 

 low the position he ought to occupy. Tillers of the soil have never 

 been the controllers of the world's wealth. Wealth and power have 

 belonged to the handlers of goods rather than to the producers. It has 

 been honorable to own real estate, but dishonorable to handle this 

 real estate with a shovel or plow. . In past ages, bread winning has not 

 called for a high degree of ekill. It is different now, but public senti- 

 ment will not change in a day. There is still an odium attached to 

 the tilling of the soil that will not "down." It crops out in our nursery 

 rhymes, aad lends a tone to the character of our school books and per- 

 vades the newspapers, and one of the worst features of the trouble is 

 that those who live on farms feel this state of affairs most keenly. That 

 a man with these facts in mind can still say that he would lollow the 



