590 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



honest and tell them you want to save what little you have in your 

 pocket for your own amusement? Now, fathers, is that the way to make 

 home pleasant and attractive? No. Are you setting a good example for 

 your sons? No. Well, then why will you do so? 



Now, parents, do you think your chidlren are yours to have and to 

 hold for your own pleasure and profit? That you have a right to do 

 what you will with them? If so, you are mistaken, they are but lent 

 to you. Every child is but a sacred trust, a responsibility, than which 

 there is none more mighty or sacred in life. Train up this child for 

 me. I will require him at thy hands, says our Maker to every parent 

 who receives a child. Judging by the declaration of inspiration. "Train 

 up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart 

 from it." 



If we do our duty and bring up our children in a Christian home, 

 and teach them the way of life eternal, our homes will always be full of 

 pleasure and happiness, and we will be permitted to reach a higher des- 

 tiny than that of earth. 



There is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars 

 will be spread out before us like the islands that slumber in the ocean 

 and where the beautiful beings that here pass before us like visions 

 will stay in our presence forever. 



WOMEN AS HOME-MAKERS. 



Mrs. Mattie Stiitzman, before Sioux Comity Farmers' Institute. 



Your program committee greatly overestimated my ability when they 

 put me on this program for a paper and failed to notify me of it until 

 it was much too late for me to prepare anything of my own. If I were 

 a preacher or a lawyer it would have been easy enough in the time I 

 had, but I am neither, being only a home-maker, the best I could do was 

 to put together in' this paper the thoughts of others. 



First of all I will give my ideas of a home. 



At a meeting of the Woman's Club in a city not long ago, the sub- 

 jects discussed were "the three things most essential to a home." An 

 elderly unmarried woman said, that she considered a husband was the 

 most essential of them' all. So important did she consider this that she 

 failed to mention the other two essentials. The rest of the women (all 

 married) didn't pay much attention to her, thinking no doubt that the 

 terms husband and home could not well be separated. A man's defini- 

 tion of home is, a wife, child, dog, book, pipe, gun and an ingienook. 



The homes we are thinking of today are not up five flights of stairs 

 in an apartment house in which no children are allowed but homes in 

 Iowa, Sioux county, if you please. Those in which there is a husband, 

 a wife and children; the pipe, dog and gun not being a necessity from my 

 point of view. 



It makes little, if any, difference whether the home is on a farm 

 five or ten miles from town, or in a village or city, the responsibility is 



