saves about
three dollars and twenty-five cents because sometimes she gets a dollar
extra for doing the washing. And when she goes to Europe for the summer
on the same ship with the Astors and the Vanderbilts, it sounds more
magnificent than it really is. She is on the same ship, but about
eleven decks down, in a corner of the steerage close to the stern, where
the smells are rich and undisturbed. And she doesn't visit ruins and art
galleries in Europe, but a huge circle of loving relatives, who pass her
around from farm to farm for months, while she does amateur business
agent work for the steamship lines, talking up the wonders of America
and--allow me to blush--the saintliness of her employers, and coming
blithely back home in the fall with three or four old childhood chums
for roommates.

Just the same, I envy our girls. I wish I could go to Europe in the
steerage, not being able to go any other way.

It's a fortunate thing for us that our hired girls do go back home and
proselyte for America, or else we would soon be jam up against the real
thing in help problems. If, for any reason, the Swedish nation should
cease contributing to Homeburg, we should have to do our own work. I
often wonder at the things our American girls will do rather than to go
on the fighting deck as commander of some one else's kitchen.
Twenty-five of our girls go up to Paynesville every morning at six on
the interurban and make cores in the rolling mills there all day.
Carfare and board deducted, they get less than a good hired girl--and
they don't go to Europe for the summers and never by any chance marry
some rising young farmer who has made the first payment on a quarter
section. Several of our middle-aged young ladies sew for a dollar a day
and keep house by themselves. And there's Mary Smith, who has been a
town problem. She's thirty-five and an orphan. She lives in a house
about as large as a piano box and tries to scare away the wolf by
selling flavoring extracts and taking orders for books. She's never more
than two meals ahead of an embarrassing appetite. Every fall we dig
down and buy her winter coal, and she hasn't bought any clothes for ten
years. Some one gives her an ex-dress and Mary does her best to make it
over, but she never looks much more enticing than a scarecrow in the
result.

Mary's hands are red with chilblains in the winter, and the poorhouse
yawns for her. But will she take a place as hired girl? Not she. Mary
h