An arrangement like this affords to both mothers and daughters a rich opportunity. But a strange little paradox comes in here. If the daughters wish to give the greatest degree of reverence and protection to their mothers they should not pay too much attention to what the mothers tell them to do. In other words if they will follow the beckoning hand of progress and take up with the suggestions of modern invention in their further housekeeping, they must depart from their parents' advice and from the ways of the old folks. The oft repeated saying, "what was good enough for my father is good enough for me," should never again be heard without protest by any member of the younger generation--at least an inward protest that will rob it of its depressing influence. It is not a want of reverence toward the memory of our forefathers that makes us wish other and different conditions from what they had. It is not a disloyalty to the living mother for the daughter to say that she will not follow in her footsteps if she now sees better ways of doing things. Shall not the large-hearted mother wish that her child may have better and improved ways, greater conveniences, lighter burdens, machinery for making work less burdensome, more leisure for the higher life? She should--but does she? She often does not see the use for the new-fangled appliances. She is too stiff to change her ways, even when she sees that the new methods are an economy of time, labor and nervous force. As to such a farm woman as that, one who is so fixed in her ways that she will not listen even for her children's sake, to the voice of progress: why, there remains nothing for her to do but to pass on. Peace be to her! She has stood there for a life-time and drudged and submitted and has done nothing for household or community advancement. Some among the older women may awake to a new life; here and there one will step over the abyss that separates her from her daughter, will pass down and stand side by side with the younger woman. But as a general thing the abyss is too fearful and she lacks the energy for the leap. There remains for her only a martyr's crown and a harp. The most isolated farm woman in the country of half a century old must have been touched by the edges at least of the wave of progress in social and home-making conditions that has swept through our life in late decades. Most of the dwellers on farms as well as townspeople have been profoundly moved thereby. Some strange new kind of utensil drifting to the remotest mountain valley and appearing in some neglected despairing kitchen, like a bit of flotsam floating across seas from richer lands, was a symbol of a reorganization as undreamed of as heaven will be found to our awakening eyes. That utensil was the call of a new era. The isolated farm wife may not have had her ears opened to know the sound, but that was what it was, for all that. It represented a new life, the making over of a whole generation.