The American Country Girl

by Martha Foote Crow

A school garden where the children are taught to love and understand the growing things as well as to cultivate them.

Next come the blue honors. The bead of this color is given for attainments in Nature Lore—knowledge of trees, flowers, ferns, grasses, mosses, birds, bees, butterflies, moths, stars. If the girl knows the planets and seven constellations and their stories, she may wear the blue bead. Also if she does a certain amount of work in a flower or vegetable garden of her own, raises a crop of something and cans, pickles or preserves her product, or if she carries on an experimental garden, planting, for instance, one plot with pedigreed and one with unpedigreed seeds and recording the results, she wins the blue bead. This is but a faint sketch, of course, of the interests in this department.

A wood-brown bead is given for Camp Craft. Here there are tent craft, wood craft, fire lore, camp cookery, weather lore, camp packing, and all kinds of knot tying. Added to this is an attractive group called Indian craft. Under this head the member may win a wood-brown bead if she knows six Indian legends or twenty-five signs of the Indian sign language, or six blazes. Is there any one who does not know what the word "blaze" means? It is the mark you cut on the tree with your hatchet by which when you are on the trail you may tell your way back home again. The applicant for this brown bead honor may know three Indian ways of testing the eyesight, or how to make a totem, an Indian bed, an Indian tepee, or a bead band eight inches long. Any one of these achievements wins the wood-brown bead.

Then come the green honors. Here the artist in the young member of the society has a chance for development. If the girl chooses she may win this bead by work in clay modeling, or in brass or silver work; in basketry, wood carving, carpentry, dyeing, leather work, stenciling, sewing, photography, hat trimming, original designs in embroidering, and many other kinds of beautiful expression through the arts.

Yellow honors are given for any sort of business positions, earning certain sums for an accomplishment worthy of the yellow bead, keeping accurate accounts, saving a definite amount, making budgets for the family, and so forth.

Then come the red-white-and-blue honors, which includes helping in the celebration of some historical day, the national birthdays, or some day connected with the history of the town in which the member lives, like a pageant or an historical tableau. Knowledge of the customs and laws of our country come under this head, and service to the community in any way, helping about keeping the town clean and about making it a better and more healthful place for all. This bead may be won by a knowledge of what the great ones of the past have done for the public good, such as religious leaders, missionaries, educators, great women, statesmen, scientists. A sketch of the life of that great woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or of that other wonderful woman, Frances E. Willard, would take this honor; and the ability to repeat from memory a certain number of verses from the Bible or a number of the world's greatest hymns, would be equally valued among these achievements.

It would certainly seem as if a girl who could win honor beads enough to string a necklace for herself might be forgiven for some slight tinge of vanity. But there is not much excuse for any girl in the land to fail to be worthy of acceptance in this honorable company, for the requirements cover so wide a range and the girls of America are so ingenious in taking hold of new ideas and moreover are already so filled with activities in all the realms touched by these inspiring suggestions, that the Camp Fire spirit ought to become a household interest in every State of the Union.

When a member has gained the precious testimonials of her attainments in these artistic and household and community services, she procures the leather cord that is essential in the proper Indian method for stringing beads, and in some shape that her original fancy shall dictate she arranges a necklace to suit her own taste. The beads are of good size; they are colored in delicate, unstaring tints, and the hole in the bead is large enough for the leather to pass easily through.

More and more honors may be worked for and won as time goes on, and the bead string may be made more and more beautiful; the wearer may thus become more of an inspiration to her friends and associates.