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Show KATHLEEN NORRIS Recall Forebears on the Fourth and stains our battleship linoleum knows, and they and the childrens' clothes and the heaped heavy dishes knew no other cleaning agent than homemade bars of yellow soap. They gathered bedraggled baby clothes and rumpled bed linen and school children's stockings just as you and I do, but they didn't have flying foaming washers and swift fragrant dryers. No, they soaped and scrubbed on tin-faced washboards, wash-boards, dried on kitchen lines, ironed with heavy iron pressers that cooled every few minutes and had to go back on the hungry great range that devoured firewood as a hippopotamus gulps down food. They fought on, when the spring rains kept all the children, all the measles and mumps and whoops shut indoors, when boots brought in their own weight in mud, when milk soured on the way from the springhouse to the table, and when the terrible "second-summer" meant that the current baby was always a source of burning anxiety. And they kept good, kept busy, kept rejoicing in the Lord. They preserved the niceties washed small hands and combed unruly heads; changed linen, dragged steaming kettles to the wash tub. They fostered learning; there was a switch ready if the school-marm school-marm she boarded about among the different families reported Impudence Im-pudence or idleness. pAN YOU TAKE your thoughts back, in this week of July Fourth, to a New England farm 100 years ago? It Is one of those picturesque farms that you and I see on our happy vacation trips; we stop with a queer inexplicable twist in our hearts as we look at the steep high roof, the elms sending leaf-shadows across the high small-paned windows, the well-sweep, the mellowed mel-lowed lines of barns and sheds stretching away toward orchard and pasture, the summer gracious-ness gracious-ness of one of the thousands of homesteads that were the American Amer-ican scene in the dramatic days of America's beginnings. If we go in there are more exclamations ex-clamations of sheer admiration and delight. Oh a spinning wheel and a loom! Oh hand-hammered fire-irons fire-irons painted like the redcoats of King George, so that any casual spitting upon them might be pleasurable pleas-urable as well as necessaryl Oh, Revere teapots and Chippendale chairs, blue home-made and gay patch-work quilts, four-posters with faded calico valances, warming warm-ing pans and melodeons, highboys and dressers in applewood or weathered maple! The floors are soft, almost yielding yield-ing beneath our feet; the doorways low and irregular, and between the old part of the house circa 1800 and the new, added 40 years later, indoor irregularities are masked by' cupboards, by steps up and down, by a narrow stair here and an angled passage there. Draught of Patriotism Who doesn't know New England, or that part of the Old South that matches it In Revolutionary age, doesn't know America. And it isn't too late to pack some bags, climb into the car and cruise off in that direction now. As a great draught of patriotism and enthusiasm and wonder, it is a lesson we all need. Wonder yes, that's what we women feel as we visualize the life women led on these beautiful old farms. Men led the hard life of . , . a picturesque farm ... farmers and settlers, too; up in the dark freezing nights of winter to look to lambs and calves, sweltering swelter-ing in the hot rocky pastures through the summer noons. But the women! Ah, you fore-mothers fore-mothers of our present easy day, how did you do it, what made it worth your while! The cemeteries tell a part of the story of these first American women. wom-en. Stop to read the stones, when you pass an old graveyard. There you will find the Aarons, the Silases, the Johns and Joshuas and Williams, Wil-liams, reaching decent ages; 68, 76, 90. Women's Names, Too And there you'll find, too, the women's names. Sarah, first wife of the above, aged 26. Mary Jane, 3rd wife of the above, 18. Eliza and Matilda and Abigail aged 23, 31, 19. It cost our women something, did America. Imagine their waking in a stone-cold stone-cold great house, with the snow packed outside, the November sky lowering and dark, the seventh child a fretful feverish teething burden at 11 months, tb-e eighth child already on the way. Imagine the dark descent to the stone-cold, chatter-toothed struggle in the kitchen; ashes cold in the cold stove, snow on the low window sills, water frozen in the pail. The floors we find so satin-smooth today were subject to all the spills |