HORTICULTURAL EDUCATION FOR WOMEN. 95 



homes, outside of their houses, we know also that from these 

 farms have come more than half of the leading minds among the 

 men of our country ; men who loved their work and did not shirk ; 

 men whose bodies grew strong and wiry with out-of-door labor 

 from their early boyhood, and whose minds were developed, not 

 from a culture freely offered them, but in spite of the poverty of 

 their opportunity, and who were strengthened by the very effort 

 they had to make to allow no chance for learning to go by, no 

 moment of leisure to be an idle one. 



From bookless and indigent homes of the past we see emerging 

 long lines of scholars, who by the very sweat of the brow earned 

 their bodily support while gathering the knowledge for the brain. 

 We glory in these bo3'S, these men ; we look with pride at their 

 brilliant course in the world, and point to their cultured — perhaps 

 elegant — homes, and contrast them with the homes they left. 

 What a contrast in these cultured homes to those -their mothers 

 toiled and toiled in, without thouglit or comprehension of the 

 beautiful things around their own doors that might and should 

 have brought them recreation, and where these mothers died per- 

 chance from toil, that they, these men of letters, might be enabled 

 to win the world. 



When the career of such a one is remarked on, we know only 

 the brilliant man — we little heed that mother ; and yet these toil- 

 ing mothers are, all over the land, dropping into silent graves, 

 overtaxed, God knows ; and another house-mother (how beautiful 

 in its meaning is this word from the German — not solely the 

 mother of the babe, or the child, but the mother of all under the 

 roof-tree, if she be a true mother) another of these toiling house- 

 mothers takes the place of the first ; and then sometimes another 

 still. It is a tradition that many of the beautiful farms among 

 your Berkshire hills have been made beautiful and rich at the 

 expense of the first, and second, and oftentimes the third wife's 

 life. And why? Man toils from early dawn till dewy eve, but then 

 may take a nap, or smoke his pipe and read his papers. Woman 

 toils from earlier dawn — she makes the fire on man}' a farm — till 

 d'ewy eve, then takes her needle and mends and makes the house- 

 hold clothes, till midnight, oft. Her rest, when found, is in the 

 grave. Nature herself attempts no more ; for after the budding 

 of spring, the flowering of summer, the fruitage of autumn, win- 

 ter's white shroud wraps her in her sleep of rest. Why toil these 



