'
IX
THERE WAS A CURIOUS social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt
the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town
to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle
out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family
to go to school.
Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little
schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they
made such sacrifices and who have had `advantages,' never seem to me, when
I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls,
who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from
poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Antonia,
been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an
old country to a new.
I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black
Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something
unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a
race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigour which, when they
got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive
carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black
Hawk women.
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