p. 23 | COURTESY by Gail Hamilton

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 17, 1878

COURTESY

By Gail Hamilton

There is perhaps no single quality that does so much to make life smooth and comfortable—yes, and successful—as courtesy. No man can be agreeable without courtesy, and every separate act of incivility creates its little, or large, and ever-enlarging, circle of displeasure and unhappiness. One does not wish to go through life trying to be agreeable; but life is a great failure if one goes through it disagreeable.

Yes, believe me, you may be very learned, very skillful, very accomplished. I trust you are: I hope you will become more so. You may even have sound principles and good habits; but if people generally do not like you, it is because there is something wrong in yourself, and the best thing you can do is to study out what it is and correct it as fast as possible. Do not for a moment fancy it is because you are superior to other people that they dislike you, for superiority never, of itself, made a person unlovely. It is invariably a defect of some sort. Generally it is a defect arising from training, and therefore possible to overcome.

For instance: two girls in the country have each a pony phaeton. One drives her sisters, her family, her guests, her equals, and never thinks of going outside that circle. Another does the same; but, more than this, she often takes the cook, the laundress, or the one woman who often is cook, laundress, housemaid, all in one. And to them the drive is a far greater luxury than to her own comrades, who would be playing croquet or riding if they were not with her. Now and then she invites some poor neighbor, she takes some young seamstress or worsted-worker to town to do her shopping; she carries the tired housewife to see her mother, she drives a widowed old mother-in-Israel to some gathering which she could not otherwise enjoy. These are not charities. They are courtesies, and this bright-faced girl is sunshine in her village home.

Another thing in which she excels is the acknowledgment of courtesy, and this is itself as great a courtesy as the performance of kindness. If she is invited to a lawn party or a boating picnic, whether she accept or not, she pays a visit to her hostess afterward, and expresses her pleasure or her regrets; and she pays it with promptness, and not with tardy reluctance, as if it were a burden. If she has been making a week's visit away from home, she notifies her hostess of her safe return and her enjoyment of the visit, as soon as she is back again. If a bouquet is sent her—too informal for a note—she remembers to speak of it afterward. You never can remember? No; but she does. That is why I admire her. If she has borrowed a book, she has an appreciative word to say when she returns it; and if she has dropped it in the mud, she does not apologize and offer to replace it. She replaces it first and apologizes afterward, though she has to sacrifice a much-needed pair of four-buttoned gloves to do it! Indeed, no other person has so little apologizing to do. She does everything promptly; and you may notice that what we apologize for chiefly is delay. We perform our little social duties, only not in good season, and so rob them of half their grace. It takes no longer to answer a letter to-day than it will take to-morrow. But if the letter requires an answer instantly, and you put it off day after day, your correspondent is vexed, and your tardy answer will never be quite a reparation. Remember that no explanation, no apology, is quite as good as to have done the thing exactly as it should be in the first place.—Gail Hamilton.