igO MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



is awkward and uncultured, they take warning from him or learn 

 not to laugh if he scalds his mouth with hot tea or overturns his 

 plate ; strangers often give me, too, a text about correct behavior." 



The additional work imposed by chance guests is, indeed, a good 

 investment and brings profit in the great business of home-making 

 and home education. 



Interchange of visits between city and country folks is also 

 profitable. City friends are not always able to adjust themselves 

 gracefully to country conditions and prove a burden ; but they, 

 too, bring in new and enlivening ideas, many of them, whether 

 worthy or not of acceptation, stimulating to consideration and re- 

 flection. 



The visit of the country dweller to the city home gives equal 

 profit, and the pleasure of "comparing notes" is not to be despised. 

 Those of us who live in the country or in small towns would find it 

 advantageous to make as great an effort and exhibit as great de- 

 termination to secure a few weeks in the city in the winter as the 

 city family make to have a summer outing in the country. It 

 might be done with little more effort than that by which the 

 summer outing is secured. The effect might not be that which 

 the flamboyant imagination of a city reporter sees, but the con- 

 clusion would doubtless be the same happy one. As the city re- 

 porter sees it: "The modern city is a magnificent training school 

 in quick wittedness. It takes the incoming ruralities, whether for- 

 eign or domestic, chokes them rudely but healthily out of their 

 habits of doddering along, puts jump, snap, ginger into them, and 

 soon they are alive throughout ; they have good circulations ; their 

 brains are fed with hot, bright-red, thought-producing blood. And 

 then their awakened intelligence teaches them that the country is 

 the place to live." Some of us, however much we may resent his 

 view of "ruralities," can agree at least with the last sentence. 



A hospitality which brings different types of people together 

 must ever be helpful — what has occurred in St. Louis this year, the 

 exchange of a tendency of that city and of the whole state of 

 Missouri toward provincialism for a new tendency toward cosmo- 

 politanism. Every "getting together" of people of different habits 

 and thoughts is good. 



A recent trenchant fictitious sketch of a niother-in-law represents 

 her as saying to the new daughter-in-law : "You know, my dear, 

 Reginald would prefer to remain at home with his pipe and a 

 magazine than to hear the greatest prima donna that ever sang." 

 Whereupon the bride comments : "Now, the enjoyment of physical 

 comfort is a conspicuous masculine weakness, sympathy for the 



