be sure, to have good manners! How happy the parent whose young
daughter knows just how to hold her hands in company, just how and when
to smile, just how to enter a room or gracefully leave it. Easy,
indeed, must lie the head of that mother who is secure in the knowledge
that her daughter will never make a false step in the stately minuet of
etiquette, or strike a discordant note in the festival of life; that
she will never laugh too loud, nor turn her head in the street, even
when the gay and glittering "king of the cannibal isles" rides by, nor
do anything odd or queer or unconventional. To the mother who believes
that good manners can be taught in books and conned in dancing schools,
there is something to satisfy the heart's finest craving in a strictly
conventional daughter, who thinks and acts and speaks by rule, and
whose life is like the life of an apricot, canned, or a music box wound
up with a key. But to my thinking, my dear, good manners are not put
on and off like varying fashions, nor done up like sweetmeats, pound
for pound, and kept in the storeroom for state occasions. They strike
root from the heart out, and the prettiest manners in the world are
only the blossoming of a good heart. Surface manners are like cut
flowers stuck in a shallow glass with just enough water to keep them
fresh an hour or so, but the courtesy that has its growth in the heart
is like the rosebush in the garden that no inclement season can kill,
and no dark day force to forego the unfolding of a bud.




VIII.

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.