432 WISCONSIN STATE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
the farmer’s wife must be more independent than the lady of the 
city. She is more often and more completely thrown upon her 
own resources. Her practical hands must do the work of the 
dressmaker, the milliner and the tailor, in turn, if need be. Shall 
she be asked to do more ? Many farm houses expect to keep 
help through haying and harvesting, if the girls are not grown up. - 
And they would keep it through the fall work if they “could 
only afford it, but it does cost so much, and there is neighbor 
Brighteye, she always does her own work the year round; 
and husband thinks we must econcomize, for the taxes are so 
high this year.” Perhaps when the bright millenial years shall 
come, the taxes will not be so high, but till that time, we may expect 
to meet them every year with our last dollar. 
Help in a farmer’s kitchen is not a luxury that may be dispensed 
with at pleasure. It is a necessity of the life and happiness of 
every member of the household. But, says one, we can’t get the 
help. Why ? Girls do not like to live on farms, there is so much 
to do. Oh, no, I guess not; there need be no more done there 
than in the city. Look over the labor of keeping house in the 
city; its restraints and meaningless formalities, and compare it • 
with the farmhouse as it may be, not as it often is, and the most 
fastidious will admit its claim to comfort. Do not for a moment 
suppose that the farmer is always to blame; quite often the wife 
will tell you the same old, old story of hard times, poor crops, 
taxes, etc. Orators have declaimed, and poets sung the beauties of 
pastoral life, and the delicious scents of ripening clover and new 
mown hay, the variegated shades of tasseled, waving corn, the 
patient cow, and the golden balls of yellow butter; but 
truth, which is stranger than fiction, and much more prac¬ 
tical, shows the other side of this bright picture, and paints 
weary limbs and aching heads. You will hear the farmer’s 
daughter decidedly saying she will never marry a farmer, no, not 
she, and with a careworn, overworked mother ever before her, she 
is not likely to change her mind. And the farmer boy, strong, 
able and willing to work his way through life, only waits for his 
twenty-first birthday, if indeed he waits that long, to emancipate 
him from distasteful toil, and we find him besieging shop doors 
for a clerkship, mechanic shops for a situation, or if nothing better 
