We are becoming better pioneers every year, though there are people who think we are going back. We don’t care an awful lot about electric lights and cement sidewalks as some of our progressive neighbors do. We have the best streets within fifty miles of us and we are content to walk in them or in footpaths along the sides. We get along very well with kerosene lamps and on a pinch can use candles. We have good schools and in them are using some methods copied from our Southern neighbors. We try as far as possible to teach arithmetic and farming together, reading and farming together, geography and farming together. It’s just as good exercise we find for our young folks to figure out how much five bushels of potatoes at a dollar ten a bushel will amount to as it is for them to figure out how much five times one, decimal, one and a cipher is. It’s just as easy for them to learn to read by reading about flowers and simple gardening as it is about how the cat caught the rat. It’s just as interesting for them to learn the physical geography of the world, not as a separate study, but as part of their dry-as-bones boundary statistics. We are encouraging athletics in the schools. We are backing the school teams with our attendance at their games and our applause. It’s a fact that the average country boy needs gymnasium work more than the average city boy. He needs the training, the drill and routine work. We are teaching our girls to cook and sew. We are teaching them to cook and sew economically. Both our women and our girls were getting into the baker shop habit. When we started in we were buying city-made bread. Think of it, in the country of home-made bread, where we have both material and time! We don’t buy much baker stuff now. We don’t buy as much patent medicine as we did. In the first place, there isn’t a store in town--not even the drug store--which carries it any more. A man wouldn’t dare. If you want any of the stuff you have to send to town for it, and while this is still being done no one lets anyone know he’s doing it. Those with the habit get it and swallow it the way they do their rum and most of them know pretty well that this is all it is.