In the present day of rush and hurry, there is little time for “home” example.  To the over-busy or gaily fashionable, “home” might as well be a railroad station, and members of a family passengers who see each other only for a few hurried minutes before taking trains in opposite directions.  The days are gone when the family sat in the evening around the fire, or a “table with a lamp,” when it was customary to read aloud or to talk.  Few people “talk well” in these days; fewer read aloud, and fewer still endure listening to any book literally word by word.

Railroad station reading is as much in vogue as railroad station bolting of meals.  Magazines—­“picture” ones—­are all that the hurried have time for, and even those who profess to “love reading” dart tourist-fashion from page to page only pausing at attractive paragraphs; and family relationships are followed somewhat in the same way.

Any number of busy men scarcely know their children at all, and have not even stopped to realize that they seldom or never talk to them, never exert themselves to be sympathetic with them, or in the slightest degree to influence them.  To growl “mornin’,” or “Don’t, Johnny,” or “Be quiet, Alice!” is very, very far from being “an influence” on your children’s morals, minds or manners.

=HOME EDUCATION=

A Supreme Court Justice whose education had been cut short in his youth by the Civil War, when asked how, under the circumstances, his scholastic attainments had been acquired, answered:  “My father believed it was the duty of every gentleman to bequeath the wealth of his intellect, no less than that of his pocket, to his children.  Wealth might be acquired by ‘luck,’ but proper cultivation was the birthright of every child born of cultivated parents.  We learned Latin and Greek by having him talk and read them to us.  He wrote doggerel rhymes of history which took the place of Mother Goose.  He also told us ‘bed-time stories’ of history, and read classics to us after supper.  When there was company, we were brought down from the nursery so that we might profit by the conversation of our betters.”

Volumes full of “manners” acquired after they are grown are not worth half so much as the simplest precepts acquired through lifelong habits and through having known nothing else.

=THE OLD GRAY WRAPPER HABIT=

How many times has one heard some one say:  “I won’t dress for dinner—­no one is coming in.”  Or, “That old dress will do!” Old clothes!  No manners!  And what is the result?  One wife more wonders why her husband neglects her!  Curious how the habit of careless manners and the habit of old clothes go together.  If you doubt it, put the question to yourself:  “Who could possibly have the manners of a queen in a gray flannel wrapper?” And how many women really lovely and good—­especially good—­commit esthetic suicide by letting themselves slide down to where they “feel natural” in an old gray flannel wrapper, not only actually but mentally.