It is not reasonable to assume that every well-trained country girl will find it advisable to take a college course. So, instead of saving up for college expenses, she may be taught to lay by something for the day of her marriage and with the thought of helping equip a home of her own. As a matter of fact, it is not a question of the specific purpose for which the money may be set apart. The main issue is that of staying by her day after day and week after week, and guiding and advising her until she finally acquires good sense, mature judgment, and self-reliance in regard to the business affairs that may be expected to constitute a part of her life as a keeper of a home of her own. _How the southern girls earn money._--One of the most interesting and significant modern movements in behalf of juvenile industry is that of the Southern Girls' Tomato Clubs, originated in 1910 by Miss Marie Cromer, a rural school teacher of North Carolina. Thousands of young girls are now participants in the new work, each one tending a small plat of tomatoes and canning the produce for the market. One girl is reported to have cleared $130 from one season's crop raised on one fourth of an acre. The General Education Board and the National Department of Agriculture have given liberal support to this tomato-growing work. CHAPTER XVI _WHAT SCHOOLING SHOULD THE COUNTRY BOY HAVE?_ It is a well-known fact that rural life conditions have been changing rapidly within the past decade or more. It has taken us a long while to get away from the thought that the farmer is to be anything other than merely a plain, coarse man, comparatively uneducated and innocent of the ways of the world. But we are at last seeing the light in respect to this and many another such traditional belief of a menacing nature. We are now looking forward expectantly to the time when the rural community shall contain its proportionate share of people educated or cultured in the full sense of either of these words. CHANGES IN RURAL SCHOOL CONDITIONS Many of those now in middle life can easily remember when the farmer boy was sent to school only during the time when his services were not required for the performance of the work about the field and the home. This period was narrowed down to about three months in the year. After the corn was husked in the fall, he entered school, usually about December first. And at the first sign of spring, about March first, he was called away to begin preparations for the new season's crop. During these sixty days, more or less, the growing lad was supposed to pick up the rudiments of learning and by the time maturity was reached to have worked himself out of the ranks of the illiterate. So he did, for he learned to read falteringly, to write a scrawling hand, and to solve a few arithmetical problems.