One day, while driving in the market of Cracow, our carriage came up with a vigorous young peasant woman who was tramping, barefoot, briskly along the highway with a bundle swung on her shoulder. In this bundle, I noticed, she carried a milk-can. We stopped, and the driver spoke to her in Polish and then translated to my companion, Doctor Park, in German. At first the woman seemed apprehensive and afraid. As soon as we told her we were from America, however, her face lighted up and she seemed very glad to answer all my questions. I learned that she was a widow, the owner of a little farm with two cows. She lived something like fourteen kilometres (about ten miles) from the city, and every day she came into town to dispose of the milk she had from her two cows. She did not walk all the way, but rode half the distance in the train, and walked the other half. She owned a horse, she said, but the horse was at work on the farm, and she could not afford to use him to drive to town. In order to take care of and milk her cows and reach the city early enough to deliver her milk she had to get up very early in the morning, so that she generally got back home about ten or eleven o'clock. Then, in the afternoon, she took care of the house and worked in the garden. This is a pretty good example, I suspect, of the way some of these peasant women work. All day long one sees these women, with their bright-coloured peasant costumes, coming and going through the streets of Cracow with their baskets on their backs. Many of them are barefoot, but most of them wear very high leather boots, which differ from those I have seen worn by peasant women in other parts of Austria and Hungary in the fact that they have very small heels. I had an opportunity to see a great many types of women in the course of my journey across Europe, but I saw none who looked so handsome, fresh, and vigorous as these Polish peasant women. It is said of the Polish women, as it is said of the women of the Slavic races generally, that they are still living in the mental and physical slavery of former ages. Probably very few of them have ever heard of women's rights. But, if that is true, it simply shows how very little connection such abstract words have with the condition, welfare, and happiness of the people who enjoy the freedom and independence of country life. At any rate, I venture to say that there are very few women, even in the higher ranks of labouring women in England, whose condition in life compares with that of these vigorous, wholesome, and healthy peasant women. How can work in the stifling atmosphere of a factory or in some crowded city garret compare with the life which these women lead, working in the fields and living in the free and open country?