State Convention—farm life. 
241 
that the young women of our time care so little for a knowledge 
of domestic duties. The mother who does not instruct her daugh¬ 
ter in the mysteries of housekeeping, for mysteries they surely 
are, is laying up for that daughter a lasting store of hardships. “ I 
blame my mother,” said one young housekeeper of our acquaint¬ 
ance, “ that she did not teacli me to do the house work which she 
so well understood.” 
A practical knowledge of housekeeping will make these duties 
pleasant. Housework will not be drudgery when skillfully per¬ 
formed. Artists and chemist’s work may be done even in the 
kitchen, but this is not to be learned the day that it is needed. If 
it does not require education and skill to run the domestic ma¬ 
chinery successfully in a modern household, says that accomplished 
woman, Emily Huntington Miller, “ then we do not know what 
does.” In no place is this knowledge needed more than in the 
farm house. 
Woman has her full share to do in making farming successful. 
If the pleasures of home are satisfactory, the business which sup¬ 
ports it is quite likely to be satisfactory also. Those who tell us 
most about the hardships of farm life give to farmers’ wives their 
full share of commiseration. Many are the gloomy pictures drawn 
by friendly writers—not as beneficial we have sometimes thought 
as a few suggestions about remedies would have been—yet in too 
many cases true, no doubt, but circumstances, education and nat¬ 
ural temperament have much to do in the case. Where one has 
the happy faculty—bappy for the possessor-^of banishing care, 
which men possess more largely than women, the burden of care 
is quite likely to fall on the latter; but where all interests are mu¬ 
tual, and love has not grown cold with increasing years, and the 
happiness of the wife and mother receives due attention, this mat¬ 
ter of hardships is pretty evenly divided. 
It is something to know that a strong arm and willing hand is 
ever ready to provide the creature comforts, and to look interest¬ 
edly after all the growing wants of the family. There was much 
good sense in the reply of one noble woman, a tireless worker in 
her city home, to her neighbor, who remarked that men knew very 
little about hardships, when she said “ I do not know about that; 
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