at him.  Serve him with alacrity, say nothing not necessary, and the joy in your heart will thaw him out before long.  Express to your customers your desire that they should come again,—­never by words, because that is too difficult, except in a barber-shop, where it is a custom—­but by opening the door for them at their departure, even if you have to keep another customer waiting, and by thanking them on receipt of the money, 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

RALPH WALDO EMERSON,

“to a man as we are to a picture, which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.”  There is more natural courtesy in the country than in the city, just as there are more privileges where three clerks are at work than where there are a hundred.  And then, again, civility seems to be lacking in the city as well naturally as out of necessity.  Milton has put this forcibly by saying “courtesy oft is sooner found in lowly sheds, with smoky rafters, than in tapestry halls and courts of princes, where it first was named.”  The small courtesies sweeten life.  The great ones ennoble it.  The extent to which a man can make himself agreeable, as seen in the lives of Swift, Thomas Moore, Chesterfield, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Aaron Burr, Edgar Poe, and those odd creatures called