ILLINOIS STATE DAIRIMEN’s ASSOCIATION. 
35 
♦ 
In Webster’s Spelling Book,” the most important 
text-book of the fathers and grandfathers of the American 
people, there was a funny old picture of “ The Country 
Milkmaid and Her Milk Pail,” which once seen could not 
be foi gotten, and it would seem that these worthies did not 
drink in the truth of its moral. Oddly enough it came 
between the picture and the story. It ran thus: 
“ When men suffer their imagination to amuse them 
with the distant and uncertain improvements of their con¬ 
dition they frequently sustain real losses by their inatten¬ 
tion to those affairs in which they are immediately con¬ 
cerned.” 
After looking at the picture they probably skipped the 
moral to get to the story and thought it meant that women 
should not think so much of fine things and of going to 
town, and should not “ count their chickens before they 
were hatched.” 
Perhaps the author began “ When men, etc.,” and put 
the moral first, (such a very unusual thing), in order that 
they might not fail to see that it applied particularly to 
them, but that they did not learn it or teach it to their sons 
and grandsons recent events would warrant us in believing. 
It is quite evident that this milkmaid lived when there 
were strong premonitions of a breaking up in society, even 
in country society. 
She had not unalloyed satisfaction with her condition 
in life as her English cousins seemed to have. She for a 
moment succumbed to an alleged weakness of her sex and 
allowed her mind to wander from her legitimate occupation 
to the whimsicalities of dress and its’attendant temptations. 
She had even decided on the color of her prospective 
gown. She knew well enough that the other sex believe 
“ fine feathers make fine birds,” and that thereby they 
wpuld be attracted and she felt all the joy that comes of in¬ 
dependence, and imagined how she would express proper 
scorn and discard their attentions. How admirable it 
would have been considered, had she succeeded ! But she 
felt her triumph too early. The record left her transfixed on 
that page, paralized by that one audacious toss of the head. 
It never seems to have occurred to anyone that she 
