In other portions of the vast and but partially subdued West, conditions may be trying but they are not hopeless. Here, as we have seen in former chapters, life to the Country Girl may be buoyant and inspiring even though the eight hour day of hard labor may stretch out to ten or twelve or even fourteen hours. The rest is sweet, conscience is crystal-clear, and "what one does is of consequence." It is that ultimate possibility that lends zest to effort, the "consequence" that inheres in the task. While the registry of cattle brands in the local western newspaper always includes among its symbols some three-ply hook or decimal fraction or swastika design that stands for the ranch of an enterprising and successful woman, there is always a suggested possibility to the mind of the young girl that lends fervor to her efforts. It is not forbidden that she should excel and even have a ranch of her own. The author knows of an efficient woman who owned and ran for twenty-five years a ranch of fifty thousand acres in the midst of the southern Rockies. The place produced annually twenty thousand tons of hay; they had about ten thousand head of cattle, three thousand head of horses, two hundred angora goats, selling the wool for sixty cents a pound; there were two thousand chickens, three hundred head of hogs, and two thousand doves. A stream ran near the house from which a five-pound trout could be taken at any minute. In summer some fifty men were employed. The owner had a son and a foreman with whom she advised, but she managed things herself. There was also a daughter, she sometimes put on a sombrero and drove one of the two-furrow disk plows when ten in a line worked over a field one mile wide by four miles long, following the big irrigation ditch that ran along the side of the field. Of course the woman's opportunity and will to own a farm are not confined to the Western country. Many a girl in New Hampshire, Michigan or Alabama has saved the old home for her disabled parents by putting her shoulder to the wheel, bearing the disaster of the near-cyclone and the barn-burning, the desertion of renegade "help," and the distrust of old fogy neighbors. A girl graduate of Wellesley has hastened to acquire a farm in a lovely river bend in Central New York before the price goes higher still, and one has doubts of her success until one hears her at the telephone arguing with a man who thinks he can go back on his bargain about her wind-fall apples. Stories like these would take us trailing across the country from Maine to California and would leave us bewildered before the upspringing of new life everywhere in the energies of the young women of America.