II-IX

There was a curious social situation in Black
Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction
of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had
come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly
every case, to help the father struggle out of
debt, or to make it possible for the younger
children of the family to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-
hard times, and had got little schooling them-
selves. But the younger brothers and sisters,
for whom they made such sacrifices and who
have had "advantages," never seem to me,
when I meet them now, half as interesting or
as well educated. The older girls, who helped
to break up the wild sod, learned so much
from life, from poverty, from their mothers
and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia,
been early awakened and made observant by
coming at a tender age from an old country
to a new. I can remember a score of these
country girls who were in service in Black
Hawk during the few years I lived there, and

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v?