t
we have been able to do before we can take a long breath and try to do
more. All this the Country Girl of to-day may do for her present home;
and in her future home, if she does not do it, she will be completely
out of tune with her time.

In a thoughtful and courteous book on rural conditions in the United
States, by a distinguished English observer, the suggestion was made
that the woman in the farm home is the fitting person to keep the
accounts. The author decides this by her leisure (save the mark!) and by
her well trained faculty for detail.

This statement of opinion aroused a storm of comments in other books,
chiefly by American gentlemen, claiming that the farm woman lacks the
training for keeping accounts and the large comprehension needed for
that part of the business. But this training is now accessible to the
Country Girl, and we believe the "large comprehension" will come with
experience. At any rate this will come to her as easily as to the
unwilling agriculturalist himself, and the leisure (in a new era) and
the faculty for detail will remain her valued assets. It is idle to say
in this day and age of the world that the woman has no mind for the
keeping of accounts when women are bankers and millionaires and managers
of large business enterprises by myriads.

It is a simple matter for the girl to take charge of the butter and egg
accounts, and also of the bookkeeping for the whole farmstead: she will
be all the better mentally and morally for attending to this duty.
Mentally she will improve under the discipline of exactness and
promptness; morally she will improve under the discipline of the
strictness and definiteness required by the responsibility. The reason
why so many women have been so irresponsible in money matters is because
they have been treated as children and therefore have adopted the habits
of children in their buying and selling.

There is a telephone girl who can tell the 'phone number of nearly all
the houses in three large cities where she has worked in the hotel
'phone booths. There are a good many things she cannot do but she can do
that. The person at the head of the department for receiving payments
at one of the largest department stores in New York City is a woman. She
takes in all the bills and makes change on the charge slips and the
checks, and estimates all the details of the accounts. She puts her mind
completely upon the papers in hand, so that while a set of these ar