can neither weed lawns nor dig gardens, clean furnaces nor shovel snow. The girl who should turn grocery clerk or who became a component part of a baker's or butcher's or hotel-keeper's staff in her college town would be a focus for the puzzled attention of the whole faculty, while a student dairymaid, fruiterer, or butter-merchant within the confines of the college would raise a storm of protest from Maine to California. Yet college men in similar positions meet only praise and commendation.

Doubtless some of the occupations in the diminished list for girls declared official by college censors will seem trivial enough to the masculine student-merchant who sells milk by the thousand quarts and butter by countless pounds. Nevertheless, the college girl invests as much energy and strength and originality in her tasks as the college man in his. If she earns as much money as he, her effort must be almost doubled. Few girls, under the circumstances, have the physical exuberance necessary to meet the strain of entire self-support. They must stop short at self-help. But the attitude of a woman's college is strongly paternal. Though restrictions are laid on the student who works her way, scholarships and loans, as far as they go, are the compensations, and, when these are exhausted, a protective care and watchfulness which seldom fall to the lot of the college man.

Moreover, a girl by virtue of being a girl has an inherited knowledge of housewifely tools before she puts on her first pinafore. It is her one point of superiority over her college brother, and she has made the most of it. As symbols of the higher education, broom, dust-pan, and needle should be enshrined with cap and gown, for they are the weapons with which many a student has won her diploma. If all the girls who have ever worked their way through college could be passed in review and made to answer the question "How?" nine out of every ten would probably pay tribute to the commercial value of their feminine accomplishments.

The aptitude of women for housework Mount Holyoke has put to good use. Students answer the bell and act as housemaids and waitresses. A brigade of girls looks after the dining-room; the tables are cleared and set, salt-cellars filled, silver cleaned, and dishes washed, with fun and laughter that shut out the idea of irksome work. No student of the college escapes her share of domestic service. As far as possible she is allowed to do what she likes best. Seniors have the first choice and freshmen bring up the rear. Outside of cooking and scrubbing, the entire domestic machinery of the houses. is managed by the girls. But the tax on each student's time is slight. Fifty minutes is the longest period required, thirty the average; and when a girl becomes expert in her task

she can whisk through it in even less time. This small amount of work means that college expenses are a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars less than they could be otherwise. The reduction is most important to the poor student, but is in no way an affront to her selfrespect, since her neighbor, with an inexhaustible supply of dollars, has exactly the same treatment. The" domestic system" at Holyoke is a survival of the old days when higher education for women was in its infancy. The college was a seminary then, but at the time of its founding offered more advanced work for girls than any other school before it, and prepared the way for Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley, which were the climax of the movement. the middle of the century, money, as a rule, was scarce in the families of girls hungry for more learning than the district school could supply, and even if it was not, fathers were reluctant to invest any great amount in the doubtful experiment of educating their daughters. The answer of Holyoke to this objection was the domestic system, which saved the work of many maids, and applied their wages on the students' accounts.

In

your parlor to-day." In such insignificant ways as this, say the Holyoke authorities, students may learn the whole law of equivalents, which, universally applied, might transform a world.

Wellesley, until a few years ago, exacted housework of every student. But on many accounts it was thought best, in the later development of the college, to strike this requirement out, raising the price of board instead, and allowing the students to pay outright the money for which formerly they had given an equivalent in work. The system, however, was not entirely abandoned. It is still in operation at two of the college halls, Fiske and Eliot, for the benefit of those who need it especially self-helping students who otherwise would find a college course utterly impossible. In both cottages the girls are allowed a discount of one hundred dollars for the

In the years that have followed, the need for economy has grown less and the girls' tasks have been lightened little by little. But the psychological effect of the domestic system seems to those in charge of the college most desirable, and housework will probably be part of the college régime for years to come. Even the exchange of tasks, the advocates of the system feel, has a definite value. "I'm owing you one 'domestic service,'" says the rich girl to the poor girl who has an examination, a rehearsal of a play, and an essay to copy in the same afternoon. "I'll pay it now, if you like. You washed my glasses the other night, and I'll dust

work they do. Everything is arranged for their convenience, and even filling lamps becomes almost a pleasure when it can be done in a room as neat as wax, with a congenial companion. This task, too, has the advantage of definiteness. It may not seem so dainty a performance as whipping up a golden custard or evolving an original cake; but when fires are slow and ovens rebellious, and the baking takes twice as long as it should, the house dessert-maker envies, oily fingers and all, the lamp-filler who can calculate her work to a dot.

At Oberlin, which was one of the first colleges to offer the higher education to women on equal terms with men, earning one's way and housework, to the women at least, seem to have the inevitable connection of cause and effect. Self-supporting students there have come to be such a common occurrence that the town coöperates with the college and takes them into consideration

in planning to have its work done. Many of the Oberlin homes, and some of the boardinghouses as well, dispense with servants entirely, and give college girls their places. In one way it is helpful to the working student to be taken for granted. She is one of a series of self-helping girls that has filed through the college without interruption since it first opened its doors. The town is a thrifty one. Its inhabitants have no money to spare, and in a business transaction they must be sure that for what they give they receive a just value. Therefore, if a student has room and board which cost four dollars a week, she must give four dollars' worth of work, at ten cents an hour,-five cents less than is given the Oberlin man, -which means forty hours a week, or about five a day, spent in assisting the lady of the house. With such a heavy mortgage on her time it is all

but impossible for her to finish her course in four years. Oberlin allows its students to spread their work over five or six years, and the self-supporting girl, unless she has a constitution of iron, must take the longer period. In other colleges, where self-supporting students are more of a rarity, a girl may slip into a place where she has room and board in exchange for only a nominal amount of work. The Oberlin girl, whatever her trials, will not be demoralized by getting something she does not pay for; but by the time her five hours' stint is over for the day, she feels that her self-respect could survive the shock if her patron should find it more blessed to give than to receive.

For the Oberlin girl who prefers to concentrate her housewifely talents on herself, Keep Home, an old-fashioned, rambling house owned by the college, provides rooms

POSITIVELY

NO LOAFING

ALLOWED

136 ABOUT ES BLALDING

at fifty cents a week. With the little cookstove which is part of the furniture of every room, a frying-pan, and a coffee-pot, she has all the paraphernalia necessary for her frugal meals. Her breakfast oatmeal simmers while she is dressing. At noon she slips a potato into the oven with one eye on her Latin grammar, and completes her midday meal with a dish of canned corn, perhaps, and an egg or two. Supper becomes simple or elaborate according to her appetite and the state of her funds. Meat is sometimes included in the bill of fare, but to the girls at Keep Home it often ceases to be a daily necessity. Some of them are farmers' daughters who come in from the surrounding country, and parental visits more or less frequently result in a supply of eggs and vegetables, or bread and cake, which the mother has made with loving thoughts of her college girl. But the student who comes from a distance and has no convenient link between herself and the home larder can live very reasonably and wholesomely at Keep Home if she has even a working knowledge of the chemistry of foods. One student's weekly expenses, including room-rent, fuel, light, and food, amounted to a dollar and sixty-five cents, and her meals, she said, were plentiful and good. Weekly expenses, with very careful planning, can be brought down to a dollar, and occasional girls have lived on seventy-five cents, but not without a loss of physical strength, which left them in poor condition for college work. Sometimes girls get only their breakfast and supper, taking dinner in one of the boarding-houses of the town and working out the cost of it, which is ten cents or more, by washing the dishes and setting the table. afterward.

Keep Home for more than forty years has been the refuge of poor students. While college life for its occupants, perhaps, has not been so full of color and enjoyment as for the girls who needed to take no anxious thought for the morrow, they have made the most of the blessings they could have, and, without exception, by their achievements in the world have made Oberlin proud to acknowledge them as graduates.

In the University of California, as well as in Oberlin, housework is a popular way of solving the problem of self-support. Many of the girls find places in private houses of Berkeley, where they earn their board and lodging with three or four hours' work a day. The university has also undertaken a very interesting experiment, which is nothing less