lar and ten cents per day, is taken as the standard
of comparison, the question of national service becomes very simple,
indeed, for there is but one class, and no other that is even
distantly related to it, but if national service is taken to mean the
doing of something for our country's good which we would not feel it
our duty to do but for the emergencies created by the war, then there
are many ways in which the sincere citizen may serve.

The Abilene Valley School was closed all last year, and weeds are
growing in the garden in which the year before flowers and vegetables,
scarlet runners and cabbages, poppies and carrots, had mingled in wild
profusion. The art-muslin curtains are draggled and yellow, and some
of the windows, by that strange fate which overtakes the windows in
unoccupied houses, are broken.

The school was not closed for lack of children. Not at all. Peter
Rogowski, who lives a mile east, has seven children of school-age
himself, from bright-eyed Polly aged fourteen to Olga aged six, and
Mr. Rogowski is merely one of the neighbors in this growing
settlement, where large families are still to be found. There are
twenty-four children of school-age in the district, and in 1915, when
Mr. Ellis taught there, the average attendance was nineteen. At the
end of the term Mr. Ellis, who was a university student, abandoned his
studies and took his place in the ranks of the Army Medical Corps, and
is now nursing wounded men in France. He said that it would be easy to
find some one else to take the school. He was thinking of the droves
of teachers who had attended the Normal with him. There seemed to be
no end of them, but apparently there was, for in the year that
followed there were more than one hundred and fifty schools closed
because no teacher could be found.

After waiting a whole year for a teacher to come, Polly Rogowski, as
the spring of 1917 opened, declared her intention of going to Edmonton
to find work and go to school. Polly's mother upheld her in this
determination, and together they scraped up enough money to pay her
railway fare, and board for one week, although it took all that they
had been putting away to get Mrs. Rogowski's teeth fixed. But Polly's
mother knew that when her Polly began to teach there would be money
and plenty for things like that, and anyway they had not ached so bad
for a while.

The city, even Edmonton, is a fearsome place for a fourteen-year-old
girl who has no frie