us to have our time for something else? But we do not look at these things from the right point and think about what it really means in the long

run.

The Kitchen Utensils.

Of all the conveniences possible in your kitchen, have utensils that are well made. There is so much cheap stuff in the stores, that is not cheap in the long run. When we buy this cheap tinware, for instance, we are simply wasting our money. Get a few things at a time and make them last, and where we spend so much of our time in the kitchen it pays to have the things to work with. I have never known it to fail, when I have given a course of cooking lessons in a place for a week, but what some one would say: "I would like to cook too if I had all those things to cook with." It is not so very expensive. We cling to old and cumbersome utensils, or make shift with things fit for the ash heap, and I wonder if it is because we are so everlastingly economical. We haven't the courage to discard anything usable. It is not saving in that way-not really -because we do not save our time or strength or tempers. There is nothing that will keep one so good-natured as being contented. A good cook needs to have a good range in her kitchen. A contented cook is a good tempered cook. If we can have a gas range, then, of course, we are very fortunate indeed. Many of you are city people and can have the gas range, which is easy to clean and easy to work and does away with all that soot and ashes, and that takes time and means a great deal of labor. I find many women do not realize how much easier it is with a gas range than a cook stove. It is a

great point to do away with all this extra work.

A sink that is made of porcelain is easier to clean than an iron sink. All the wash bowls should be flushed daily with boiling soda water - - sal soda. That is one thing that is most convenient to use for that purpose. The water thrown in there should not be greasy. When that water runs out from the sink, the plumbing is such that there is a drop down below. It curves up a little bit and then goes down. The water rests in this drop. If that water is dirty, greasy water, it is not very good for the condition of the kitchen. Hot water will more readily cleanse the pipes than cold water, but sal soda, a tablespoonful or more in boiling water, will do more to prevent the clogging of sinks. When I was doing my own work, I do not think that the sink clogged up once in three years, and I think since I have had help in the home it has been stopped up dozens of times. These are simple things, the thorough flushing of the pipes and always remembering in the morning, for instance, when we draw water to put into the tea kettle, to let the water run for several minutes before doing that. The water which has been standing over night in the lead pipes is not the water we want to use for making our coffee or tea in the morning.

Now, I find if I go through all I had mapped out here that it will take too much of our time, it is such a large subject to cover.

I think you will be very glad to get back again to the subject of foods, as you certainly showed a great deal of interest in it in the first part of the program. After the talk last evening, I am sure you will be pleased to again meet Mrs. Laws, who will talk to us about the preparation of foods.

I was very much interested in listening to these lectures, and I know most of you have been also. I am very glad indeed to endorse everything that has been said. I was very glad about what Mrs. Armstrong said about being interested in the things we do and that it is the way in which we do them that makes the difference to us. I so often think of Lydia Child's saying: "Though with my hands 1 feed pigs, no power on earth can prevent my soul from communicating with angels."

I am also glad she spoke about ventilation; that is a good subject; we simply cannot exist without fresh air. I know that from experience, because when I was a young girl I was in bed with consumption for a year and a half, and I was cured, not by any kind of medicine, but by pure, fresh air, so I know what it will do if you will only give it a chance to do it. Even in the smallest roomed farmhouse, we can get a piece of two by four, raise our window and drop the window on it. Now, you see, the fresh air does not come in in a swift current, but it comes in between the two window sashes with an upward sweep, just exactly as if you had turned a hose of water on there. As it drops it is being warmed. By the time it reaches the floor it is not cold air, and it doesn't come in with that draft of which we are so much afraid. When I first began lecturing with the Farmers' Institutes, I was thinking I would spend most of my salary hiring carpenters to take off the storm windows in hotels where we stopped. It is wonderful how much pure air will help us to keep well and strong. I almost believe you can eat anything, cooked any way, if you have plenty of fresh air. You do not want to run the risk of this sort of kill or cure performance, however, so we prefer to have good food cooked in the right way. A teacher in one of your Wisconsin schools says she had a pupil who was quick and smart, except on Thursday morning, then she was stupid and was sleepy most of the forenoon; she was trying

to discover what' was the matter with her on Thursday morning and asked her if she went to a party on Wednesday evening, and she said no, and at last she said in desperation, "What do you eat for breakfast on Thursday?" She said, "We always have buckwheat cakes and sausages on Thursday." She asked her mother if she would not have them on Saturday morning, for then she can go out and play and will get plenty of oxygen and can digest buckwheat cakes and sausages, but, she said, on Thursday morning she sits here over the school desk and we are expecting the surplus blood to be up about her brain and it is really around her stomach digesting buckwheat cakes and sausages.

Making the Best of Our Environment.

Now, I want to talk a few minutes to those of you who possibly have not even the plumbing and cannot have all these things, even though they are so desirable. Of course, my work, after · I left the public school work, has been principally among people who did not have them—in the country—and there we have to contend with a great many inconveniences, and we can do so much ourselves to counteract it. A year ago I was doing a great deal of work in Canada. We drove over 300 miles, leaving all roads behind us, simply taking the old Indian trails and following them in a wagon. We held three Institutes a day sometimes and slept over night in the homes of the settlers, and I tell you I learned how people can get along beautifully and be very happy, contented and healthy and have a good deal of culture and education, too, under very trying circumstances.

I remember one day we drove up at noon to a place over 30 miles from the railroad and we rode to the kitchen door, and I jumped out and said, "I will go and see the lady of the house and see if we can get something to eat." I knocked at the door and a very tired looking woman came to the door.

She said, "You don't want any dinner, I hope." I said, "Yes, we have been driving for 30 miles and held an Institute, couldn't you get us something? I will be glad to help you get us some bread and butter and coffee and eggs." "Eggs! I haven't seen eggs since we came out west. Our butter is all gone and we haven't any milk." It was a very unsatisfactory looking home, very

uncomfortable.

I

She was as unhappy as she could be. "Have you no children?" I asked her. "Yes, they are not here. Just as soon as they got old enough they have gone away from here, and I don't blame them, I would go too if I could." We got along a little further for supper; it was about the same size and under the same conditions exactly. I got out by the kitchen door to knock, but we did not even get a chance. A very good looking woman came to the door and said, "You are the Institute people, are you not? thought you would be along this way, so I got ready for you." In 15 or 20 minutes we had an elegant supper on the table, and the beauty of it was everything was grown on their farm. There we had the finest kind of ham that had been cured right on the farm, and we had chicken and eggs, fine radishes and lettuce nobody could live better than we did there, and everything had been grown on their farm, 35 miles from any railroad! She told me she knew the other family well; they came there the same time, both were heavily in debt, now one had great beautiful barns, fine stock and everything just as fine as could be. The other was in debt, and their sons, just as fast as they could, had gone off to the city. The other one had five sons with five farms all around the old one. They had a piano and organ, they had the best of books. Now, these families had started exactly the same way, had the same kind of a farm, same kind of land, the same conditions-the difference was wonderful! We can make ourselves, we can just about make our conditions, but we have to be interested in it, we have to study it, we have to make that our life work!

A Convenient Kitchen.

I want to tell you about my kitchen. It is small, but I am proud of it. I

would like to have you all see it. It is plain, and I do not like to have a lot of stuff around to keep clean that I am not using. I have on one side a sink. I am not fortunate enough to have plumbing. I covered the wooden sink with zinc. I took a great, big, tin funnel and to that I fastened a piece of ordinary garden hose. I bored a hole in the outside wall of the kitchen. Outside stands a barrel on wheels and all the water that goes in that sink runs out and is carried away very quickly. In the winter I cannot do that, so I turn it through the other wall in the sink into a pail, and I can see when that pail is full. Above the sink I have hanging everything I want to use there. I always wondered why it was that a kitchen was such a poorly furnished workshop. It is the most important workshop in the world, it is true, because in the kitchen you are building the man and woman of tomorrow, they must build their bodies from the food which they eat. Now, if it is such an important workshop, why is it so poorly furnished? It is because women work there. You go into a kitchen on an ocean liner. When we returned from Europe on the "Baltic" we had 3,500 people on board-that is a city in itself.

There were just three little closIets in which all the cooking was done for those people, but it was arranged perfectly, because men were doing the cooking in that kitchen. Look at a shoemaker, how conveniently he has every tool arranged in his shop. Everything is right there. He has his pegs right there and don't walk for them every time he wants some. I tried to use that same business idea in fixing up my kitchen. I stand in the center of the floor and I think, "Where am I going to use this?" I decide where, and put it there. So, above my sink I have my dish pans, dish cloths and soap handy. In the next wall here I have a large window. Here I have my table covered with oilcloth. On the end of it I have a piece of zinc nailed on so I can set a hot kettle on it. I always have my kitchen table on castors, then I can roll it anywhere I want. So, if I am making cakes for breakfast, I do not have to take a walk from my stove over after that batter every time, I roll it over to the stove.

If I roll out cookies, I have it right there. Now, on this side of the window, I have spoons and egg beaters, and all that sort of thing that I am going to use there hanging right up on a little plain moulding, two cents a yard it costs. On this side of the window I have an ordinary set of pine shelves. I keep spices, flavoring extracts, and all that sort of thing there where I can reach over and get them without taking a single step. On this wall I have an ordinary range; above it I have fixed a rack where all my lids are. If I am cooking anything I can lean over and take a lid. On the other side I have another rack where I keep pie tins, etc. You think probably they gather dust-they are used too often to gather dust. They are very convenient and handy for me to get at.

I have white sash curtains in the window; I have a box of parsley growing there in the window. It gives a nice look to the room, too. I have other little conveniences; it is a convenient place to work. I have had girls come into my kitchen and say, "Isn't this nice? I would like to work here. It looks like a doll's kitchen." Have it convenient, for it saves time, and then, as Mrs. Armstrong says, have the best of utensils. It does not take long to burn up enough rice or potatoes or prunes to pay for a good kettle.

The Selection and Preparation of Food.

Now, next to the workshop, which is so important, is the kind of food we are going to cook there. The time is crowded, so I will not have time to speak of it much now. The cost of foods is nothing to judge their nourishing value by. We pay a great deal more for taste and looks than we ever think of paying for nourishment. We must depend upon the composition of the food.

Our food is made up of two classes. We have the red part, the protein, it is the part that builds blood, muscle and tissue, the part we must have, and especially children. It is the expensive part of our food always. Then we have the starches and sugars, the carbohydrates she spoke of. Starch and sugar is the same thing, only sugar is starch turned ripe and starch is sugar not

turned ripe. In the spring before an apple is ripe it contains starch; in the fall that same apple contains no starch, but a great deal of sugar. All summer the sun cooked that apple and turned that starch into sugar. The sun has cooked it. That is the part of the food that gives us heat and fuel. If you ate a pound of fat it is the same as if you ate two and a half pounds of starch or sugar. Then we have this little mineral matter here, which is so important; it gives the firmness to the bones; it gives us red blood; it keeps us healthy. We get a good deal of that from fresh vegetables and fruits. If you are going to boil vegetables a long while in a whole lot of water, you had better throw away the vegetables and drink the water.

Now, we have next the starch food. We have these two classes: the one that builds the body, the other that gives the power to work with. The potato is an excellent sample of starch food. If your child ate a potato of this size, it would only get so much body building food as this marked "C." We want to cook that starch. If we take a slice of raw potato and look at it through a microscope, we will find that it looks like this: a lot of little bags made of tough cellulose. Inside of them are little hard, wrinkled up kernels of starch; they do not taste good; they do not do any good. If your child eats a raw potato these kernels go right through that child's body and come out absolutely unchanged, but it takes six hours to dispose of it; he has spent his time and strength in getting rid of it. Even you, unless you are a very strong person indeed and do a lot of physical work, cannot digest raw potato. In cooking the potato, we want to do just what the heat of the sun did to the apple. The apple in the fall is sweet, the potato is not. The sun does not get at the potato, so we have to do thatfinish nature's work. We want to dissolve or burst those bags, pop them open, fluff them open, let the heat get at the kernels of starch and make them mealy. You know how they look when they come on the table properly boiled; just as if you had taken powdered sugar and sprinkled them with it. They are easily digested. In the cooking school I always have my girls cook a