are baking I clean the
vegetables for dinner and put them on to cook, set the table and put
the dinner on, meanwhile watching the baking pies, the rising bread, and
the ripening cream. In the course of the morning ten or a dozen persons
have come in for milk, eggs, butter, or something else, and I have to
wait on them and keep their accounts up in my book. After dinner the
bread is ready to make into loaves and is then set to rise again before
baking. While the bread is rising I scald out the churn and rinse with
cold water and then put in the cream and churn it by hand. After the
butter has come and gathered, I remove it from the churn, rinse the
buttermilk out and work the butter; salt and work again and set it in
the cellar till the next day, when it must be worked again and put into
pails or jars. Then I pour the buttermilk from the churn into a jar and
set it away for future use, clean and scald the churn, setting it out in
the sunshine to dry. By this time the bread is ready to bake and must be
watched rather closely and the wood fire also. I begin to get things
ready for supper, going out into the garden to pick berries, gather
vegetables, dig potatoes, etc. Meantime I wait on more people. After
straining milk and skimming other milk, I eat supper and then measure
out milk for evening delivery, get vegetables and bread ready to be
delivered also and start the boy on delivery. Wash dishes and meanwhile
wait on milk customers who are transients. When boy returns from
delivery, I wash milk cans and put them out in the air, write up books
of accounts, plan out next day's work, make list of groceries, etc.,
that must be bought to replenish our slender stock. By this time it is
ten o'clock; I am weary and my hair is a sight. After taking off a
little of the dirt with a sponge in the wash basin I tumble wearily into
bed until the next morning."

An account like this arouses a perfect hornets' nest of question-marks.
It cannot be well for the nation, and especially for those that are to
bear the burden of the day in decades to come that the girls of the
present time should in any large numbers be required to endure such
strain as this sixteen-hour-day of unremitting, heavy and exacting work
imposed upon a young girl between the age of thirteen and seventeen, in
one of the largest and most prosperous farming States of this country.
Fortunately she has had phenomenal strength and physical persistence,
and the baneful condi