Beginning life in a new country with small capital involves many years of hard work and strict economy, perhaps privation and loneliness. This comes especially hard on the farmers' wives, many of whom have grown up in homes of comfort and plenty in the older States. Ask the men what they think of Iowa, and they will say that it is a fine State; it has many resources and advantages; there is room for development here; the avenues to positions of profit and honor are not so crowded as they are in the older States; a good class of emigrants are settling up the State: that, on the whole, Iowa has a bright future before it. But the women do not deal in such generalities. Their own home and individual life is all the world to them, and if that is encompassed with toil and hardship, if all their cherished longings and ambitions are denied and their hearts sick with hope deferred, this talk about the undeveloped resources of Iowa and its future greatness has no interest or meaning for them. In their isolated homes on the bleak prairie they have few social opportunities, and their straitened means do not allow them to buy books or pictures, to take papers or magazines, or to indulge in many of the little household ornaments dear to the feminine heart. What wonder, then, if their eyes have a weary, questioning look, as if they were always searching the flat prairie-horizon for some promise or hope of better days, something fresh and stimulating to vary the dull monotony of toil? "There's a better time coming," the farmer says. "When we get the farm paid for we will build a new house and send the children to town to school;" and so the slow years go by. If every new country is not actually fertilized with the heart's blood of women, the settling and development of it none the less require the sacrifice of their lives. One generation must cast itself into the breach, must toil and endure and wear out in the struggle with elementary forces, in order that those who come after them may begin life on a higher plane of physical comfort and educational and social advantages. They have not, like the settlers of Eastern States, had to fell forests, grub up stumps, and so wrest their farms from Nature; but they have none the less endured the inevitable hardships of life in a new, thinly-settled country, far from markets, railroads, schools, churches and all that puts a market value on man's labor. I see many women who have thus sacrificed, and are sacrificing, their lives. Their faces are wrinkled, their hands are hard with rough, coarse work, they have long ago ceased to have any personal ambitions; but their hopes are centred in their children. Their self-abnegation is pathetic beyond words. Looking at them and musing on their lives, I think truly The individual withers, and the world is more and more.