And yet there is a dark side to their lives, or rather that of their wives. Female help in the house is so difficult to obtain that the wife of many and many a man, who is worth easily from $30,000 to $50,000, has perforce to perform more hard manual labor than has the wife of the ordinary mechanic, the owner, perhaps, of a very humble home, and who earns his $1.25 or $1.50 per day. Pardon me, reader, for drawing this unpleasant picture, but it is indeed too true, and there is something very wrong in the “eternal fitness of things,” when men of such ample means are able and willing to pay for servants to ease their wives’ lots, and they cannot be obtained. The only hope on this score seems to be in emigration. When our country becomes more thickly populated, and a living in the country is not quite so easily obtained, then the daughters of households having therein a number of girls will go out to work rather than be pinched at home. Formerly the daughters of the farmers would go out to work among the neighboring farmers, and usually married the sons of those farmers, and became in their turn mistresses themselves. All this is now past, and our farmers’ families, with increasing wealth, do not go out to work but feel perfectly able, as no doubt they are, to live at home. Not a few of our farmers, feeling that they were not big enough upon their own farms, became storekeepers or manufacturers in the towns. No doubt, in the abstract this may be well for the general progress of those towns in building them up and laying the nucleus of new industries. They do not, however, as a rule, succeed in the new fields of business they have chosen, or if they do not become the principals of businesses in the towns, they sometimes lend their names as endorsers to assist those who are principals of such businesses. Endorsations were sometimes very easily obtained by the glib-tongued business man, and for a time all went on well, until some financial crisis overtaking the business man, consequent ruin came to the farmer. These instances have been so many that I speak of them as exemplifying another phase of life in the country. Latterly, however, the landowners are becoming more conservative of their means and credit, and are disposed to “paddle their own canoe.”