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Country Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago - Personal recollections and reminiscences of a sexagenarian by Canniff Haight
page 38 of 203 (18%)
sunset the scene was repeated. The matron required no nurse to take care
of the children; no cook to superintend the kitchen; no chamber-maid to
make the beds and do the dusting. She had, very likely, one or two hired
girls, neighbours' daughters. It was quite common then for farmers'
daughters to go out to work when their services could be dispensed with
at home. They were treated as equals, and took as much interest in the
affairs of the family as the mistress herself. The fact of a girl going
out to work did not affect her position. On the contrary, it was rather
in her favour, and showed that she had some ambition about her. The
girls, in those days, were quite as much at home in the kitchen as in
the drawing-room or boudoir. They could do better execution over a wash
tub than at a spinet. They could handle a rolling pin with more
satisfaction than a sketch book; and if necessity required, could go out
in the field and handle a fork and rake with practical results. They
were educated in the country school house--

"Beside yon straggling fence that skirts the way,"

with their brothers, and not at a city boarding school. They had not so
much as dreamed of fashion books, or heard of fashionable milliners.
Their accomplishments were picked up at home, not abroad. And with all
these drawbacks, they were pure, modest, affectionate. They made good
wives; and that they were the best and most thoughtful mothers that ever
watched over the well-being of their children, many remember full well.

Country life was practical and plodding in those days. Ambition did not
lure the husbandman to days of luxury and ease, but to the
accomplishment of a good day's work, and a future crowned with the
fruits of honest industry. If the girls were prepared for the future by
the watchful care and example of the mothers, so the boys followed in
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