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personal labor of it all; and no man knows of what he talks, when he thinks to go about farming as he would go off to fish, lazily, and brimming over with sentiment and dreams.

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FARMERS' WIVES.

IN this country, the wife of the farmer stands

at the head of society. She may not know it, yet it is gospel truth. Beginning back with the foundation, or elements, of our social system, we find that she is at the bottom of all the bold and brave enterprises that have made us great, and has sustained the burden and heat of the whole day in our national growth and advancement. And it is because she has had the making of the men, training and moulding them from the very gristle of boyhood.

She has carried the entire fabric in her heart; since upon her have our heroes relied, and to her looked for the sweetest approbation. The wives of the farmers were the real Women of the Revolution, of whom never can too much be said in praise. Little or nothing could have been done without their aid.

The wife, in the country, is the one being who can make the homestead beautiful. She

calls into it the atmosphere of genuine love. She is the single and powerful magnet, by which husband and children are attracted there. She can make all things bright and lovely, or she can bring down cloudiness and gloom, put everybody in the sulks, and set the whole household to wishing they were established somewhere else.

A woman can do as much as that, with great ease, anywhere; but in a home in the country, she has full and peculiar power. It is not so easy to get away from a home in the seclusion of rustic life, that is notoriously uncomfortable; but in the changing crowd of a large city, it is a very different matter.

Farmers' wives are scarcely aware of their influence; if they were, they might at times employ it to better immediate purpose. They practically underrate themselves, to begin with. They run to one extreme, and consider themselves of no consequence in the world at all; and then they run to the other, and insist that they are just as good as anybody else. Which, of course, they are. A little brush--the least in the world of city influence, and they are all in a flutter; instantly they are ready to forget the beauty and the endearing associations of their country home-life, and to make them

selves unhappy with envy of their city cousins' flounces and fanfaronade. The calm, contemplative, truly religious existence they enjoy in the heart of Nature, they undervalue at all points, and are ready to exchange it for the daily view of stony streets, the daily sounds of rattling vehicles, and the almost positive certainty of never again seeing the sun either rise or set.

But there is a reason for much of this

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unsettled feeling of hers. In the country, woman is made too much a mere drudge. may sound all very romantic and sweet to your ears, dear madam, to hear the talk of the Arcadian life such a sister must lead, away from large towns and their frivolous influences, but it is not such a life as you allow your imagination to dish up before you. Think what it is for a woman a wife—to milk cows, to suckle calves, and sometimes to feed the pigs; to attend regularly on the ducks and chickens, besides performing various other chores not altogether in harmony with her feminine nature. Then, again, the same tasks always hard follow one another in a continuous round from morning till night, one day upon another; and she must be different from the rest of her sex, who can help offering silent

thanksgiving when God draws the curtain of night for the world to lay its head on its pillow and go to sleep.

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The English country ladies-we have all heard about them; about their fresh robustness, their rosy health, and their overflow of animal spirits. We wish one half as good news could be told of the country ladies of America, with their anxious, care-worn countenances, as if all the interests of the farm devolved as they often do upon themselves. In a good many cases they are a deal "smarter than the men, and take the management out of their hands. They can reckon you up the cost and value of a hog, or a "critter," without even going near the slate that hangs inside the pantry; whereas their husbands would be studying, like industrious Champollions, all the sundry chalk-marks about the house and shed, in hopes of getting at what they wanted. If many of our farmers are asked by a travelling drover what they will take for such or such a "beef critter," they will show in a moment their disinclination (if not their inability) to sell, without first consulting "mother."

In this, among other ways, the woman in the country becomes gradually unfeminine,

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