ks. In time her
records will be added to those, and she will have been of great service
to the world by giving new knowledge that may be used for the benefit of
her whole region. In this way the Country Girl, however lonely the farm
where she lives, may feel that she is in touch with great movements, and
can believe that her life is of especial use to the world.

CHAPTER XXII

THE ILLS OF ISOLATION

The fruits of modern inventive skill and enterprise have enriched
country life and have banished forever the extreme isolation which
used to vex the farm household of the past. The farm now is
conveniently near to the market. The town, churches, and schools
are near enough to the farms. The world's daily messages are
brought to the farmer's fireside. And the voice of the nearest
neighbor may be heard in the room though she may live a mile away.

--_Professor G. W. Fiske._

CHAPTER XXII

THE ILLS OF ISOLATION

"Isolation" is a word that the Country Girl does not very much use, but
still she feels the meaning of the word. This note sounds in the
unusually frank answer of one who did not speak for herself but said
that she really thought some of the other girls went away to the city
because there was no one in the village for them to marry, and in the
naive words of the girl who stated that she always said a club was a
very good thing. Where the community does not afford the social life
they crave as a part of their development, as the natural normal state
for their self-expression, and as a part of their plans for life, it is
no wonder they seek it elsewhere. This is one of the chief causes of the
cityward tendency. For this reason the girls are willing to exchange the
pure air of the country for the close atmosphere of the town; the safe
and kindly surroundings of the rural home for the dangerous conditions
of the city, its unregulated contacts, its promiscuity and its perils,
and its loneliness in the midst of the indifference of strangers. There
is a forbidding solitariness in the city that is to that of the country
as a desert to a garden. This misery attacks one even more virulently on
the noisy boulevard than along the whispering country lane. But this the
Country Girl does not know, and she seeks relief from a woe that she
does understand.

Perhaps the young woman on a lonely farm in some remote region does not
realize this. She may be too dulled and discour