_First Year:_ Hygiene, biology, chemistry, household administration, cookery, physical training, and some electives. _Second Year:_ English, French or German, biology, nutrition, cookery, chemistry, physical training and electives. _Third Year:_ History, economics, household administration, clothing, textiles, nursing, and electives. _Fourth Year:_ English, administration, hygiene, social science. [Illustration: Children in a country school scoring corn. Everywhere the country is responding to the call of Progress, and these members of a new generation are striving to reach the best.] The elective studies in this general course may be taken from among such titles as these: Dietetics, household sanitation, eugenics, sewing and embroidery, textiles (woolens, silks, cottons), clothing, laundering, landscape art, plant breeding, poultry husbandry, bee culture, pomology, vegetable gardening, meteorology, rural economy, marketing, cooperation, organization, rural education, citizenship. Such courses as these are given at Cornell University, at Simmons College, Boston, at Connecticut Agricultural College, at the University of Chicago, and elsewhere. Correspondence courses are offered in many colleges. The names of many such courses have already been given in the report of one of the girls who took such a course under the direction of the Pennsylvania State College, Center County, Pennsylvania. The young woman in planning to go to the university for a course in domestic science must take into account the benefits that she herself will gain from the association with the other students in the classes and in the various college exercises. The educational influence the student-body as a whole will have upon the development of the individual has been already mentioned. There are two things that no young person can gain without going away from home to some educational institution. They are these: contact with the great teacher, and contact with the great fellow-student. The first she can make up for to some slight extent in the reading of books; for the loss of the second, if absolutely deprived of it by the lack of companions in her own community, she cannot be reimbursed in any way. And there is nothing quite so inspiring as the personal contact with the revered instructor, nothing so entirely vivifying as the group of fellow-students. Deprived of all this, however, the girl in a lonely life must make up for it as best she may, by books, by personal experiments, by keeping a buoyant and cheerful spirit, by seeking excellence by all means that are attainable. In this endeavor she may approach heroism, and in doing this she may well attain the supreme ends of life without the help of schools, or of machinery, or of any human aids whatever. CHAPTER XXI A GREAT OPPORTUNITY The mission of the ideal woman is to make the whole world home-like. --_Frances E. Willard._ CHAPTER XXI A GREAT OPPORTUNITY