156 WE FARM FOR A HOBBY 



beyond peradventure they are clean. She feeds and 

 waters the chickens and gathers the eggs at least 

 once, sometimes twice, a day. She grades eggs, or 

 picks fruit, or makes jelly, or cleans a chicken or 

 duck, or helps at scrapple- and sausage-making. I 

 could not list all the things she turns a hand to, 

 from selling surpluses to dosing a sick pig. 



It makes for full and strenuous days. But 

 neither so full and strenuous as, on the one hand, 

 to preclude a normal amount of recreation and 

 diversion, nor, on the other, to sink to the dead 

 level of drudgery. We both believe we may be 

 wrong that the average inexperienced woman 

 thinks farm life compounded of drudgery, mo- 

 notony, and loneliness. We are equally sure that at 

 least an equal number of women, here in the 

 United States, hope to get through life without 

 ever doing an honest day's work. Of them let no 

 man speak. Comparisons should be made rather 

 with the conscientious city housewife or the busi- 

 ness woman. 



The feminine bogies of drudgery and loneli- 

 ness are a lot of tingle-tanglecertainly as far as 

 this part of the country is concerned. True, our 

 nearest neighbor is all of a hundred yards away, 

 instead of being fenced out by a party wall. In 

 the east it is pretty hard to get further away from 

 a big town than we are unless one goes into the 

 woods and prepares to make farming a profes- 



