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 gether in their buggy the springs sagged and passers-by felt sorry for the horse. Luke was a big, stupid looking lout, with small blue eyes and beefy jowls. He could neither read nor write; although Hat had been heard to say on different occasions that Luke could read "some kinds o' print." The kinds that he could read, however, did not include the kind universally employed.

Hat, a big, coarsely made, gipsy-like girl, was, to use her own phrase, a "great reader." She subscribed to a monthly magazine called "The Farm Wife's Friend," which cost her twenty-five cents a year. When she found the magazine in her mail box she took it home eagerly, full of delicious anticipations, and read it from the name in fancy print across the top of the first page to the last advertisement on the back sheet. It was printed in the vilest manner on the sleaziest of paper. Sometimes parts of it were so badly printed as to be illegible. It contained two or three sentimental love stories describing doings of people in high life. These stories abounded in beautiful heroines with delicate hands that had never approached a dish rag or a hoe handle, noble heroes and wicked, but fascinating villains. They opened to Hat a vista of unexplored possibilities and caused her to sigh over her own lack of opportunity.

Almost as engrossing as the stories, were little articles on how to get the best results with turnips, how to make the eyes sparkle, how to keep little chicks from getting head lice, how to remain always a mystery to your husband, how to keep sheets from fraying at the hems, how to make five hundred dollars out of a flock of fifty geese, how to tell fortunes with the tea cup, how to polish cut glass, how to keep the hands dainty and delicate, how to live so that the world is sweeter and sunnier for your presence, how to make orange marmalade out of carrots and how to treat a cow with a caked udder.

All of these "useful hints" Hat read with avidity, and many of them she tried to apply in her own household. She spent hours messing over a stew of mutton fat and cheap perfume in an attempt to make a homemade cold cream for beautifying