Part 42

But in the midst of it all the Colonel put an emphatic end to the discussion. He rode into the donga with his rope swinging free, and when the cheetah failed to spring at him, he dropped the noose over the animal's head and dragged him out on to the open veldt, where his picture could be properly taken.

The black porters looking on commenced speaking in low tones in their native tongue, and nodded and grinned at each other as they had done before. But this time Mac was among them. Mac was Kearton's tent-boy. He originally came from Somaliland and spoke English. He was called upon to explain what the porters said.

"Please," he began. "They are very bad men, these people, but don't be sorry. They say--they say that, of course, the white gentlemen are able to do what they want to do, but just the same they are all crazy."

That night we held our second consultation. Ulyate had returned from Kijabe with the extra wagonload of supplies, which placed us in a position to move again immediately. The question now arose as to whether it would be best to remain where we were a few days longer to gain more experience, or to trek at once over the Mau, with a chance at giraffe on the way, and so on into the Sotik country, with its alluring promises of both rhino and lion.

By this time we had hunted the Rift Valley thoroughly. During the seven days since we had left Kijabe, the expedition had roped and photographed a cheetah, a serval-cat, a hartebeest, an eland, and a wart-hog. Although we had been given no opportunity yet to find out how we were going to hold a rhino or what we would do when the lion charged, still, in addition to our success with the lesser animals, we had acquired something else of value. All the members of the expedition had learned to work well together--in all the usual emergencies each man knew what was expected of him and could likewise make a ready guess as to what the others intended doing. Thus, in spite of the fact that on an expedition of this kind it is the unexpected that always happens, our experience only added to our confidence that when we eventually encountered one of the larger beasts we should get him.

The consultation ended with the unanimous decision to start for the Sotik at dawn.

In the October number Mr. Scull will relate the; adventures of the Buffalo Jones African Expedition in Lassoing Giraffe and Rhinoceros.

***************************************************************** VOL. XXIII September 1910 NO. 3

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 368-379 part 2.}

By WILLIAM HARD

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT.

Dear General Reader, please let that sentence stand for the thousand words (much like those of a competent barker at the door of a show-tent) which you usually oblige an author to expend on enticing you into reading his article. Think how much time you save by walking straight into the tent and observing that--

THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It as no improvised amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts instruction--the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as house-keepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.

Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether--in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in any age to the home's economic value.

A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not always all that they are cranked up to be.

Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to the mourners' bench every year.

At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be assumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.

Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the just-organized Department of Home Economics in the University of Kansas, is a novel type of new woman in that she has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in the Department of Home Administration in the University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of Cooling on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.

In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over The Home, it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a demand for a million copies.

It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.

Mike was lookin' iligant As he rested there in state.

But

When the fun was at its height McCarthy sat up straight.

The ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in this case--great enough to be felt all the way around the world.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume Tsuda's Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its graduates are allowed to teach in secondary schools without further government examination) has installed courses in English domestic science as well as in the domestic science of Japan.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's College, of the University of London, has organized a three-year course leading to the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has also established a "Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in which out of fourteen students (in this its first year of existence) four are graduates of the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.

It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.