If the struggle to pay the mortgage is long and the work heavy, she does not especially enjoy spending days and nights of toil with the rest of the family to accomplish the desired end; but more than all this does she dislike having the father keep all the trouble to himself; she wants a share in the responsibility. She wants some acres of her own, some stock of her own. She wants her personality as a factor in the business, which it really is, to be justly acknowledged. For without that, she reasons, what is there to look forward to? Hope is the anchor of the soul; and without something to hope for, how can one hope? She finds that she has none of these joyous anticipations of the future that every young woman loves and has the right to entertain. She cannot look forward to the natural and normal life of the home for her future lot, for the existing scheme of country life does not provide her with a husband. Therefore if the home cannot be made happy and the work in the farmhouse cannot be made interesting, if her fair share of incentive as a human being in the common round of life cannot be assigned to her, if her part in the complex structure of the farmstead cannot be put upon an equitable basis, if the universal happy fortune of woman cannot be seen to shine as a goal in the long service of the farmstead, why, she will have none of it! If this is the irrevocable decision of the farmers' daughters of the present day, it is a very serious matter. It means that the farmstead will have to be broken up, that the farm home must go out of existence, and the whole system of farm life must be revolutionized. What will happen then, it passes wisdom to prophesy! The Country Girl may well say, "After me, the deluge!" For if at any one point in the procession of the generations, the women will stand together and say "Thus far and no farther!" the procession must stand as still as the pillar of salt that commemorates the wife of the unfortunate Lot. Can it be that the Country Girl has in some measure reached this point by doing what Lot's wife did--by simply looking behind her? Casting her eye along back over the generations, did she see anything that appalled her? May it have been something in the experience of her own mother that lent decision to her mind as she considered what she herself would choose for a life-path? Or rather, as she looked over the career that lay nearest to her, the life-struggle that was visible to her in her own homestead, did she see something that held up before her a warning hand?