books and magazines, as good music, as good health, exercise, and recreation, as respectable schools, and as cheerful homes with lawns and abundance of flowers and trees in Gopher Prairie and in Sleepy Eye as in New York City or Stockbridge. This object is perfectly attainable. It will be attained just as soon as the beautiful vague imaginations of our hungry young people become positive, realistic, and practical; just as soon as they clasp their wide's tretched arms and hold fast the good that is within reach.
Two girls of my acquaintance who can write a little are now looking towards going to New York as the great adventure. "If all goes well," they will soon be living in a six-by-eight bedroom on 120th Street, and they will be writing fourth-rate stories for fourth-rate magazines; and the great metropolis will sweep over them and leave not a trace to mark the place where they sink.
The trouble with these young women is not that they have "aspirations," but that they are insufficiently and unrealistically ambitious. For the sake of expressing their mediocrity, they are abandoning a chance to express their excellence. After a good course in domestic science, these same girls, let us say, might go into some
