efforts. It is not forbidden that she should excel and even have a
ranch of her own.

The author knows of an efficient woman who owned and ran for twenty-five
years a ranch of fifty thousand acres in the midst of the southern
Rockies. The place produced annually twenty thousand tons of hay; they
had about ten thousand head of cattle, three thousand head of horses,
two hundred angora goats, selling the wool for sixty cents a pound;
there were two thousand chickens, three hundred head of hogs, and two
thousand doves. A stream ran near the house from which a five-pound
trout could be taken at any minute. In summer some fifty men were
employed. The owner had a son and a foreman with whom she advised, but
she managed things herself. There was also a daughter, she sometimes put
on a sombrero and drove one of the two-furrow disk plows when ten in a
line worked over a field one mile wide by four miles long, following the
big irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the field.

Of course the woman's opportunity and will to own a farm are not
confined to the Western country. Many a girl in New Hampshire, Michigan
or Alabama has saved the old home for her disabled parents by putting
her shoulder to the wheel, bearing the disaster of the near-cyclone and
the barn-burning, the desertion of renegade "help," and the distrust of
old fogy neighbors. A girl graduate of Wellesley has hastened to acquire
a farm in a lovely river bend in Central New York before the price goes
higher still, and one has doubts of her success until one hears her at
the telephone arguing with a man who thinks he can go back on his
bargain about her wind-fall apples. Stories like these would take us
trailing across the country from Maine to California and would leave us
bewildered before the upspringing of new life everywhere in the energies
of the young women of America.

To many of these younger women, the fact that in America a woman does
not have to be head of a family in order to take up a claim seems a
golden opportunity; the struggle and privation inevitable in the years
of proving up, are not sufficiently appalling to prevent their attempt.
The number is swelled by recruits from among the straight college girls,
the agricultural graduates, those who have had business training, some
of the writing clan, some artists, and some who are moved by a clear
spirit of adventure. Nothing daunts them.

To this energetic girl the business part is a mere detai