There are days when my heart is so full of love for young girls that as I pass them on the street I feel myself smiling as one does to walk by a garden of daffodils.  And when I see how careful some of them are to be circumspect and demure, I think to myself how fine a thing it is, to 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.

I am more and more convinced the longer I live that the very best advice that was ever given from friend to friend is contained in those four words:  “Mind your own business.”  The following of it would save many a heartache.  Its observance would insure against every sort of wrangling.  When we mind our own business we are sure of success in what we undertake, and may count upon a glorious immunity from failure.  When the husbandman harvests a crop by hanging over the fence and watching his neighbor hoe weeds, it will be time for you and for me to achieve renown in any undertaking in which we do not exclusively mind our own business.  If I had a family of young folks to give advice to, my early, late and constant admonition would be always and everywhere to “mind their own business.”  Thus should they woo harmony and peace, and live to enjoy something like the completeness of life.

IX.

The people who make me most weary.