Riding through one of the prairies of the far West, some years since, we arrived just at dusk in front of a cabin where a mother was sitting with her four young children and teaching them lessons from the great book of nature. She had shown them the sun as it set in glory, and told them of its rising and of its going down; of the clouds and of the winds, and how God made the grass and trees, and the stars, which came trooping out before their eyes. She taught them, she said, little as yet from books. She had but a Bible, a catechism, an almanac. The Bible was the only Reader in her little school. Already she had whispered in their ears the story of Jesus' life and death, and charged their infant memories with the wise and beautiful teachings of the Sermon on the Mount.
What a practical training was that which children had in that outdoor knowledge which had been useful to their mother! The chemistry of common life learned from the processes wrought out by the air and sunshine; astronomy from the great luminaries which are the clocks of the wilderness, and the science of the weather from the phenomena of the sky. There was no "cramming" in that home-school; each item of knowledge was well absorbed and assimilated, for the mother's toils made the intervals long between the lessons. So much the better for the young heart and mind, which grows, swells, and gathers force unlaced and unfettered by scholastic pedantry and repression.
It is from the mother, too, that the boy or girl must take their first lessons in the tillage of the soil, which are most readily learned in the garden, for the women are the gardeners of the frontier. Gardening is a labor of patience and virtue, and is excellent discipline for the character. A child's true life is in the fields, and should be early familiarized with the forms of vegetable life. No small part of the education of a child may be carried on by the care and assiduous contemplation of plants and flowers. Observation, experience, reflection, and reasoning, would all come of it. A flower is a whole world, pure, innocent, peacemaking.
Woman's natural fitness for the work of an educator of the human plant is seen in the readiness and zeal with which she enters into this work of tending and training the plants in a vegetable or flower garden, and the garden is one of the outdoor schools where her little ones gain their most useful instruction. The difference between plants, the variegation of colors, their relations to the air, the sunshine, the dew, the rain; the habits of plants, some erect, some creeping, some climbing, the seasons of flowering, fruitage, and seed, are impressed with ease upon the plastic mind of childhood.
From the garden it is but one step to the meadow and the forest. Here the boy and girl sees nature unaided by man working out similar processes on a grander scale. There is heroic force and valor in the trees and grasses, and the child is early brought into antagonism with these strong forms of wild nature, and learns that he and his parents live by subjugating or converting them to their use. This is the lesson of contention in carrying through a useful purpose. The native sward is to be overturned and a new growth implanted; bushes are to be torn up root and branch so that the cattle may have pasture; the trees must be hewn down and cut into beams and boards.
Thus, too, is learned the great lesson of labor. There is no rest for the mother. The stove, the broom, the needle, the hoe, and the axe are ever the familiar implements of her household husbandry. The cows and poultry are her protégés. Her brown arms and sunburned face are seen among the mowers and reapers. Endowed with the practical faculty for small things, she reaches into details which escape the blunter senses of the stronger sex. The necessities and contingencies of frontier life make her variously accomplished in the useful arts. She becomes a "jack at all trades," carding, spinning, weaving, cobbling shoes, fitting moccasins, mending harness, dressing leather, making clothes, serving as cook, dairy-maid, laundress, gardener, and nurse. From example and from precept the children learn the lesson of labor from the mother.
The girls of course remain longer than their brothers under her tutelage. Theirs is a lofty destiny—lofty because as wives and mothers they are to carry the shrine of civilization into the wilderness, and build upon the desert and waste places the structure of a new civil and social state. Serving as a duty and a pleasure is woman's vocation. The great German poet and philosopher has finely amplified this idea:
"Early let woman learn to serve, for that is her calling,
For by serving alone she attains to ruling;
To the well-deserved power which is hers in the household.
The sister serves her brother while young; and serves her parents,
And her life is still a continual going and coming,
A carrying ever and bringing, a making and shaping for others.
Well for her if she learns to think no road a foul one,
To make the hours of the night the same as the hours of the day;
To think no labor too trifling, and never too fine the needle;
To forget herself altogether, and live in others alone.
And lastly, as mother, in truth, she will need every one of the virtues."
A French traveler in the course of his wanderings through, the western wilds of our country, came to a single cabin in one of the remotest and most inaccessible of our mountain territories. The only inmates in that lonely home were a middle-aged woman and four girls, ranging from eight to fifteen. The father was a miner, who spent a large part of the time in digging or "prospecting" for precious ores, as yet with only moderate success. The matron did the work of both man and woman. The cabin was a museum of household mechanisms and implements. Independent of the clothier, the merchant, and the grocer, their dress was the furry covering of the mountain beasts; their tea was a decoction of herbs; their sugar was boiled from the sap of the maple; the necessaries of life were all of their own culture and manufacture. Yet, thanks to the unwearied toils of the good woman and her little help-meets, there was warmth, comfort, and abundance, for love and labor were inhabitants of those rocks.
The girls had already been taught all that their mother knew, and she had sent out to fight their own battle, three sons, strong, brave, and versed in border-lore.