ke us round-shouldered and
hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, unenquiring
belief that they were 'refined,' and that the country girls, who
'worked out,' were not. The American farmers in our county were quite
as hard-pressed as their neighbours from other countries. All alike had
come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they
must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what
straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not
let his daughters go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a
country school, they sat at home in poverty.

The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers,
because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined
to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no
alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after they came to
town, remained as serious and as discreet in behaviour as they had been
when they ploughed and herded on their father's farm. Others, like the
three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had
lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent
home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to
pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.

One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our
county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out
of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbours--usually of like
nationality--and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are
to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children
are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.

I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very
stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard's grandfather was a
clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What
did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn't speak
English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or
cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Antonia's father.
Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were
all Bohemians, all 'hired girls.'

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come
into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk
merchant can ho