THE STUDY CLUB. 353 



Mr. S. M. Owen : I want to say first in response to the excellent 

 talk we have heard that the defense the lady makes of the woman's 

 study club is hardly necessary. But I was reminded as she was 

 talking of being at a table the other evening where some ladies — 

 four of them — were at the table, and they were club members, all 

 of them. One of them was boasting of how many prizes she had 

 won this season in playing cards ; another told of an occasion a few 

 days before when they gathered together to play cards and played 

 from eleven till six o'clock in the evening, stopping only to get a 

 luncheon; another one, a member of the same club, told what a 

 trouble she had in keeping her children clean, etc., and how they 

 would come into the house covered with mud in spite of all she could 

 do, and of the difficulty she had in keeping them clothed. That 

 is the sort of club that is being criticised, severely criticised and 

 is deserving of criticism. The kind of club Mrs. La Penotierre 

 talked about, the kind Mrs. Underwood and others talked of, is of 

 more importance. 



Now I am going to speak, and advisedly so, of a subject that is 

 of more importance to the people of our country than the subject 

 you are talking about here, the subject of growing fruit and apples. 

 I can scarcely conceive of any work more delightful than the work 

 you people are engaged in here, developing the fruits and flowers 

 of this country, but there is something more than that, and without 

 the development of this sentiment the work you are doing in grow- 

 ing fruits and flowers is going to be barren of results that you might 

 otherwise realize. The age is altogether too commercial. The 

 American people, as a rule, are too commercial ; they are continually 

 asking what there is in it, and that always refers to the money value 

 as though there was no other consideration. Now what is there in 

 it? What is there in this kind of work that Mrs. Underwood 

 read us such a delightful essay upon? The effort, beginning with 

 the children, to develop the spirit which will make them as they 

 grow up to appreciate the unrewarded labors that you are engaged 

 in, that you horticulturists are engaged in now. It will 

 make them more alive, because it will give them a better concep- 

 tion of what is to live. 



I am amazed, as 1 come in contact with people, to see and learn 

 in conversation with them how absolutely blind they are to their 

 surroundings, how unconscious they are of the beauty about them 

 and how little they are learning all the time. I am reminded of a 

 little trip I made between two towns in Minnesota not long ago. 

 I was traveling with three gentlemen, residents of the locality, across 



