Doing Our Best

By Mrs. A. J. Wilder. Mansfield, Missouri

I am proud of Marian because she is not a quitter; because she can take disappointment without a whimper and go bravely ahead with her undertakings even tho things do not always work out as she would like. I am sure, as the years pass, Marian will answer perfectly that good, old description of a lady, "Still mistress of herself tho china fall."

Marian failed to send her application in time to become a member of the Ruralist Poultry Club, but she is a hustler nevertheless and should not be classed as being too slow to win in the race for membership. It was not really her fault, for the Missouri Ruralist does not come to her home, so she had not read about the club and as she is a little girl, only10 years old, I did not tell her of the club until I had spent some time telling older girls about it. You see she did not have a fair start.

When she received word that the club membership was complete and her application was too late, the least that might have been expected was a crying spell, but not this little girl! She sat still a moment and then said quietly: "Well I'm going ahead just the same. Maybe some of the other girls will drop out and then there will be a place for me, anyway I'll be learning how." She is keeping her record carefully and trying to reform a farm flock of egg-eating hens while she is waiting for her purebred Buff Orpingtons to grow up and take their place.

Many a grown person might learn a lesson from the way she took her disappointment. I am certainly proud of Marian.

—

"In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love," sings the poet, but in the spring the fancy of a hawk surely turns to spring chicken. Day after day he dines on the plumpest and fairest of the flock. I may spend half the day watching and never catch a glimpse of him then the moment my back is turned—swoop!—and he is gone with a chicken.

I should like to sentence that ex-governor who vetoed the state bounty on hawks to make his living raising chickens in the hills and not permit him to have a gun on the place, just by way of fitting the punishment to the crime. I know it is said that hawks are a benefit to the farmers because they catch field mice and other pests, but I am sure they would not look for a mouse if there were a flock of chickens near by. Even if they do catch mice, that is small comfort to the farmer's wife who loses half, or perhaps all her hatch of chicks, especially when she knows that the expense of feeding the poultry is doubled because they dare not range the fields freely.

If there were enough of a bounty on hawks to make it an object to hunt them, farm women would surprise the food controller by the amount of poultry products they would put on the market. I believe the present output would be doubled if the hawks could be exterminated, for many a chicken dinner and dozens of eggs fly away on the wings of the hawks. At the price of eggs and dinners this is rather expensive and it is certainly discouraging to lose chicks that way after one has overcome all the other difficulties of their raising. I suppose tho that we will be as game as Marian and do the best we can under the circumstances. Doing the best we can is all that could be expected of us in any case, but did you ever notice how hard it is to do out best if we allow ourselves to become discouraged? If we are disheartened we usually lag in our efforts more or less. It is so easy to slump a little when we can give the blame to circumstances. I think Marian has found the way to overcome this by being so busy with mind and muscle at the work in hand that there is no time for thoughts of failure or for bemoaning our hard luck.

Mrs. A. J. Wilder. "Doing Our Best." Missouri Ruralist,  (June 5, 1917): page 13.  CLICK HERE to see this article as it originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist.

CLICK HERE to return to the list of articles from the Missouri Ruralist.