_There could be no better basis for the changes that are upon us. The new ideals of the great world are here, in our little world. Though there is an impression to the contrary, the Zeitgeist is not attracted exclusively to cities. From design in our County Fair fancy work to our attitude toward the home, new things are come upon us. To be sure, we do not trust our power. We cling to our “Well, you can’t change human nature” as to a recipe, though it does change before our eyes. If it were only that impossible plaques and pillows have given place to hammered brass and copper, our disregard might be warrantable. But now when one praises home life, home cooking, home training, home influence, we are beginning to say: “Whose home?” And the sentimentalities do not give place to reason without healthful cause. And when of late, from the barber’s children’s lunch basket, the young professor of our village took out the heavy, sunken biscuits of the barber’s new wife and threw them in the ash box, even the barber’s wrathful imprecations could not draw our sympathy to the side of the hearth, where once it would have stood upholding domestic unsanctities._ _To be sure, in the village the old confusion between motherhood and domestic service still maintains. But both in cities and in villages perhaps it is to-morrow rather than to-day that we shall see women free from kitchen drudgery, and home economics a paid profession, such as nursing has lately become. Though when one of us said this, at a meeting of the Friendship Village Married Ladies’ Cemetery Improvement Sodality, one of us rejoined_: “_What! Do you mean that a womanly woman wants any occupation besides housekeeping? Why, I love my dishpan!_” _And the burst of merriment which followed was almost a surprise to those who laughed, and to whom this extreme statement had unwittingly revealed the whole absurdity._ _Already in the village it is almost impossible to get maids, even though many have entirely ceased to say “hired girl.” Night after night we scan the Friendship Village Daily Paper (who shall read that name and not admit that we live close to the essentials?) and see the same half dozen “Wanted ... for General Housework” appeals drearily repeated. And while some of us merely wonder how “Mis’ Whatever is getting along, and the weather what it is, and her baby not through the second summer,” there are those of us who feel secret thanksgiving in the fact that we, too, are painfully playing our part in forcing the recognition of domestic service as an eight-hour-a-day profession. And “But who would answer the bell evenings?” and “Why, none of us could afford to keep help then!” sound as unreasoning as they did when apprentices first changed to clerks._