or upon delivery of the goods if it be on account. There are very few
people who will remain cold toward you after they find out you are
really glad to see them. The general store of the rural town makes


THE FINEST-MANNERED MEN IN THE COUNTRY,

respectful, dignified, alert, and unruffled. I saw a clerk at the postal
money-order office in St Paul. The Swedes and Poles go there often to
send away money. That young man had such a charming way of showing an
old Swedish woman just how to make out an order before she had learned
to write, and he had such an awe-stricken way of receiving the
instructions of other money-senders who knew all about it, that I felt
he was a credit to America, and I mention the reminiscence only with
diminished pleasure from the fact that I have forgotten the young man's
name. Courteous treatment of a customer is necessary under every
conceivable circumstance. It may be a busybody has come in to worry you,
who never bought a cent's worth of you or anybody else whom you know;
nevertheless her tongue is an advertisement. If you can gain her good
will, even comparatively, as weighed by her estimate of other clerks, it
is better than a column advertisement in the local papers. When
Zachariah Fox, a great merchant of Liverpool, was asked by what means he
contrived to amass so large a fortune as he possessed, his reply was:
"Friend, by one article alone, and in which thou mayest deal too, if
thou pleasest,--it is civility." "Hail! ye small sweet courtesies of
life, for smooth do ye make the road of it, like grace and beauty, which
beget inclinations to love at first sight; it is ye who open the door
and let the stranger in."

"We must be as courteous," says