Then again, I don’t suppose city folks know what a New England winter means to a New England farmer. Winter doesn’t mean much in the city except a complication with coal bills. Routine work goes on in the same routine way and the amusement of the beaches is shifted to the amusement of the theaters. But in the country Nature shuts up shop and there is a complete change of work and way of living. It’s a period of exile for many and a period of loafing. Men and women are shut up with themselves, or at best with their own. Six months of this isn’t good for anyone. Every old spite and grudge and grouch fattens and grows strong. Men get surly and women get cranky. Men eat too much and women cook too much. If a man hasn’t any pet grievance of his own he has plenty supplied him by the press and magazines. Farmers read too much of murders and sudden death, of corruption in business and politics and society. They have too much time to think over that stuff after they’ve read it and they don’t exercise enough to work it off. City folk stand it because they read and forget and don’t take it seriously. But I tell you some magazine publishers have something to answer for in the picture of city life they have drawn for country people whether true or not. As I’ve heard Hadley say, “’Pears to me like everything’s rotten to-day.” It makes men careless about being rotten themselves when they think all the rest of the world is. The value of our meetings didn’t end with the meetings themselves. People who had been born and brought up together met in true neighborly fashion for the first time through the Pioneer Club. This was because we furnished them a common interest. This led to more every-day intercourse that winter--to neighborhood calls and neighborhood parties. Ruth helped this along wonderfully. She entertained a good deal herself and helped others entertain, but I tell you she had her own ideas how this should be done. She wouldn’t have any fuss and feathers, such as we had experienced in the suburbs. People didn’t have to dress up in their best bibs and tuckers to call on her, and there was neither bridge nor cakes nor teas nor ices. People dropped in just as they were and brought their sewing with them. For the younger people she devised the Miles Standish play with such materials as she had at hand. Then there were charades and old-fashioned games and what not--everything simple, everything inexpensive, everybody friendly and at ease. She kept the women, both young and old, astir all winter long and gave them something else to think about besides the next day’s cooking, washing or mending. She even helped them simplify these necessary duties and taught them a more wholesome standard of living. From morning till night she was a teacher, but no one except myself realized this. She set everyone an example in her house and astonished them with the ease with which she did her own work and cared for three children without wearing herself out.