[Illustration: ARRAYED IN SPOTLESS WHITE]
The city is not a mere name to American country children. Increased train facilities, the improvement in the character of country roads brought about by the advent of the automobile, and the extension of the trolley system have done much to mitigate the isolation of rural communities. The farmer and his wife can avail themselves of the advantages to be found in periodical trips to the nearest city. Like other American parents, they invite their children to share their interests. The boys and girls are included in the jauntings to the city.
I once said to a little girl whom I met on a farm in Massachusetts: "You must come soon and stay with me in the city from Saturday until Monday. We will go to the Art Museum and look at the pictures."
"Oh," she cried, joyously, "I'd love to! Every time we go to town, and there is a chance, mother and I go to the Museum; we both like the pictures so much."
This little girl, when she was older, desired to become a kindergartner. There was a training-school in the near-by city. She could not afford to go to and fro on the train, but there was a trolley. The journey on the trolley occupied three hours, but the girl took it twice daily for two years.
"Doesn't it tire you?" I asked her.
"Oh, somewhat," she admitted; "but I was already used to it. We usually traveled to town on it when I was small."
"Countrified" is not the word to apply to American farmers and their families. One might as aptly employ it when describing the people of England who live on their "landed estates." Ignorance and dullness and awkwardness we shall not often find among country children. The boys and girls on the farms are as well informed, as mentally alert, and as attractive as children in any other good homes in America.
We all know Mr. James Whitcomb Riley's poem, "Little Cousin Jasper." The country boy in it, we recall, concluded his reflections upon the happier fortune of the boy from the "city" of Rensselaer with these words:
"Wishst our town ain't like it is!—
Wishst it's ist as big as his!
Wishst 'at his folks they'd move here,
An' we'd move to Rensselaer!"