By Anna Barrows

Director, Chautauqua School of Cookery; Lecturer, Teachers, College, Columbia University, and Simmons College.

The conditions of life in the households represented by the pupils of this school vary greatly with locality and climate, and, taken together, would give a fine composite picture of the average American home.

While reading the hundreds of papers which have passed through my hands since the School opened, nothing has impressed me more than the variety of conditions to which any woman in this country must be ready to adjust herself at short notice. Much human energy might be set free for other purposes, and much money saved, if men and women gave closer study to some of these every-day questions.

Emerson has said truly: " We must learn the homely laws of fire and water; we must feed, wash, plant, build. These are the ends of necessity, and first in the order of nature. Poverty, frost, famine, disease, debt, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to common sense."