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THE RURAL? NEW-YORKER 
October 7. 
Woman and the Home 
From Day to Day. 
BLINDFOLDED AND ALONE. 
Blindfolded and alone I stand 
With unknown thresholds on each hand; 
The darkness deepens as I grope, 
Afraid to fear, afraid to hope; 
Yet this one thing I learn to know 
Each day more surely as I go, 
That doors are opened, ways are made. 
Burdens are lifted or are laid, 
By some great law unseen and still, 
Unfathomed purpose to fulfill, 
“Not as I will.” 
Blindfolded and alone I wait; 
Loss seems too bitter, gain too late; 
Too heavy burdens in the load 
And too few helpers on the road; 
And joy is weak and grief is strong, 
And years and days so long, so long, 
Yet this one thing I learn to know 
Each day more surely as I go, 
That I am glad the good and ill 
By changeless law are ordered still, 
“Not as I will.” 
“Not as I willthe sound grows sweet 
Each time my lips the words repeat, 
"Not as I willthe darkness feels 
More safe than light when this thought 
steals 
Like whispered voice to calm and bless 
All unrest and all loneliness. 
“Not as I will,” because the One 
Who loved us first and best is gone 
Before us on the road, and still 
For us must all His love fulfill, 
“Not as we will.” 
—Helen Hunt Jackson. 
* 
Among the one-piece gowns shown as 
Fall and Winter models are very plain 
costumes of velvet or velveteen, the 
skirt plain, the bodice a short-waisted 
mandarin style, with no trimming ex¬ 
cept a net and lace side frill, and a lace 
collar. Such a dress is rich looking 
and yet simple, and is not necessarily 
very expensive. 
* 
The first international congress of 
farm women is to be held at Colorado 
Springs, Col., in October. It is planned 
to have four day sessions, covering such 
topics as home equipment, food values, 
hygiene and nursing, care and training 
of children, education and recreation. 
Rightly managed, such a congress will 
be of enormous value. It is worth 
while to make especially prominent the 
fact that the farm wife is the farm 
partner, an equal worker with her hus¬ 
band, and entitled to equal recognition 
and reward. 
* 
One of our friends has been using a 
charcoal flatiron this Summer, and 
counts it among her most desirable con¬ 
veniences. The burning charcoal, which 
is consumed very slowly, is enclosed 
inside the iron; thus it stavs hot as long 
as needed for use. Hot days the ironing 
was done out under the grape arbor, 
and of course there there was- no runr 
ning back and forth to the range for 
fresh irons. The charcoal is free from 
some of the objections made to an iron 
with an alcohol or gasoline reservoir. 
* 
The Atchison Globe remarks that 
with the possible exception of the Ben 
Davis, no apple is so ornery as to de¬ 
serve being dried. This is rather hard; 
we must own that a dried apple pie is a 
fearsome dainty when slammed together 
by an indifferent cook who encloses a 
filling that looks like sole-leather scraps 
within a cover of crust that resembles 
indurated fiber, but all dried apple pies 
are not like this. The main point in 
preparing any evaporated fruit is to 
soak it long enough to restore the mois¬ 
ture lost by drying, and to cook gently, 
simmering instead of boiling hard. 
Those who use a fireless cooker praise it 
highly for preparing evaporated fruit. 
* 
Refined sugar is now at the highest 
price it has reached in 22 years; seven 
cents a pound retail. The sugar men say 
that the drought in Europe is one cause, 
as it has lessened the production of sugar 
beets, and another cause is speculation. 
There are reports of a “corner” in sugar 
formed by the big refiners. The sugar 
men are diplomatically silent regarding 
the $2,000,000 they had to pay the Gov¬ 
ernment recently as a result of long-con¬ 
tinued frauds in customs duties. An in¬ 
crease in sugar prices at the height of 
preserving time will not be looked upon 
very cordially by housewives. Indeed, it 
will cut two ways, for there is little doubt 
some housekeepers will cut down their 
purchases of fruit, since both fruit and 
sugar are extra high in retail price. 
* 
A Virginia reader finishes a letter of 
inquiry by saying: 
Perhaps it would interest you to know 
that I am one of the “common farmers’ 
wiveswash, iron, bake, scrub, cook, and 
do all for my family of four and one help, 
and besides tend a separator and do the 
churning. I make fine butter, put up in 
neat square prints, and wrapped in paraf¬ 
fin paper, and I thank my God I am here 
to do it. 
This is the spirit that “makes drudg¬ 
ery divine”; the love and enthusiasm for 
home and family that gilds the gray 
things of daily duty. The feeling ex¬ 
pressed by the Virginia housekeeper 
brings to mind a letter recently received 
from Cape Colony, South Africa. The 
writer was a cultivated Englishwoman 
whose girlhood was spent in a well- 
ordered home, with several domestics to 
keep the household wheels running 
smoothly. She writes happily from a 
South African farm of her three small 
children and the Kaffirs who are her only 
help, and tells how proud she feels be¬ 
cause her sewing machine turns out all 
the children’s clothes, and also frocks 
and overalls for the Kaffirs, whose cos¬ 
tume, we infer, is not very elaborate 
when unassisted. She tells how she 
made a mattress for the baby’s crib, 
using nice ticking stuffed with straw, 
with little rounds of “American cloth” 
(enameled or oilcloth) where caught to¬ 
gether, giving a very professional look, 
and she wonders that more of her 
friends do not try their hand at the 
same work. Sometimes, she says, her 
husband asks her to ride with him when 
counting sheep, and she asks him wheth¬ 
er he would prefer to have her society, 
rather than to have a pudding for dinner, 
to which he responds by telling her to 
come along and let the pudding go. It 
gives a pleasant picture of happy do¬ 
mestic life, though the young wife must 
find the vast spaces of the karoo very 
different from the hawthorn bordered 
English lanes and fields of her youth, so 
many thousands of miles away. She re¬ 
marks, also, that no matter how tired 
she is, she makes a point of changing 
her dress for the evening, that she may 
not get into careless habits as the result 
of her isolated life. We think many of 
those who offer a condescending pity to 
country women because of their isolated 
life, lose sight of the many compensa¬ 
tions it certainly possesses. 
the soup through a colander; we like 
to find bits of vegetables, so I merely 
mash them roughly with a spoon and 
slightly thicken with a little flour and 
butter blended. Season rather highly 
with pepper, salt, celery salt and one 
teaspoonful sugar, and you will find you 
have a good, hearty dish. The main 
thing seems to be to get a good variety 
of vegetables and don’t forget to fry 
the onions. As this may be considered 
rather a feeble start for supper, I want 
a pudding which seems to have some¬ 
thing to it. In the absence of fresh 
apples, I call on a jar of canned ones, 
and make Duling apple dumplings. 
Make into a rather soft dough two cups 
flour, two teaspoonfuls baking powder, 
one teaspoonful salt, two tablespoonfuls 
lard (or half lard and half butter), 
seven-eighths cup of sweet milk. Roll out 
about half an inch thick, sprinkle with 
two tablespoonfuls brown sugar and a 
teaspoonful ground cinnamon, spread 
apples over, roll up, cut into 12 slices. 
Lay these cut side down in a single 
layer on a greased baking pan and pour 
over them the following sauce, which 
should be made before the dumplings: 
One cup sugar, one tablespoonful but¬ 
ter, tablespoonful flour, half teaspoonful 
salt, mix and add one cup hot water, stir 
well, cook three minutes. Bake dump¬ 
lings with sauce over them in moderate 
oven. 
“As we cannot get meat to-morrow, 
I mean to call on a can of salmon. I 
will heat it, turn salmon on to middle 
of platter, lay around it hard boiled 
eggs, sliced, and pour over all cream 
dressing with very finely chopped pars¬ 
ley. With this we will have string 
beans and potatoes with this dressing. 
Stir together until smooth one egg, half 
a cup sugar, one tablespoonful (heap¬ 
ing) flour, one teaspoonful salt, tiny bit 
of red pepper, one teaspoonful mustard. 
Add half a cup vinegar and then one 
large cup sweet milk. Set on asbestos 
mat on stove, or in double boiler, and 
stir till it thickens. It should be rather 
thicker than cream. When partly cold 
add piece of butter—if added while hot 
it is apt to curdle. Sweet or sour 
cream may be used instead of milk, but 
is not at all essential. 
“Here is a useful little recipe for 
jam: Take 2 J / 2 pounds rhubarb, cut 
into inch lengths; V/ 2 pounds rasp¬ 
berries, four pounds sugar. Boil 30 or 
40 minutes and seal while hot. You 
know rhubarb takes the flavor of what¬ 
ever is put with it, and sometimes rhu¬ 
barb is more plentiful than raspberries.” 
A. E. F. 
The foundations of national glory are 
set in the homes of the people. They 
will only remain unshaken while the 
family life of our race and nation is 
strong, simple and pure.—King George 
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My Neighbor and I. 
“How good the onions smell!” said 
my neighbor as she looked in at our 
kitchen door, a little while before sup¬ 
per. 
“To-night we have no meat in the 
house, and in these circumstances I 
often seek refuge in soup. I guess you 
make soup out of nothing sometimes.” 
“I only wish I knew how. I did not 
know it could be made without meat.” 
“We often have it and think it much 
better than no supper. Fry three or 
four onions and two or three potatoes 
cut small, then add canned or fresh 
Lima beans or a few string beans, left¬ 
overs perhaps, a few spoonfuls of to¬ 
matoes, just any vegetables there may 
happen to be around; lacking these, 
use a handful of lentils or soup beans 
or dried peas, but have a good founda¬ 
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a quart or more water and boil till all is 
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