p. 29 | Domestic Courtesy

S. D. A. Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 10, 1884

FromThe Signs of the Times, Vol. 10, No. 2

Domestic Courtesy.

The family go about silent, or nodding, scolding, and snarling, and apparently without the least thought that they are to restrain any emotion, or the indulgence of any whim. Old clothes, shabby dressing-gowns, slippers, petulance, and selfishness, are quite good enough for the home. But if the same persons are to go out to call, or to dine, or to a ball, nothing is too pretty to wear, nothing too sweet to say, no politeness too fine to display.

Now you young fellow at the table, reading the evening paper and nodding in a surly way to your mother and sister, take a test. If your clothes breathe a delicious fragrance—say of heliotrope or roses—but would do so only when you were at home, or only when you went abroad, which would you choose? Would you smell sweet at home, or when you went away from home? Would you have a perpetual climate of rare odors in your own house, or elsewhere? Of course you would have it at home, for your own comfort and enjoyment, you curmudgeon, if for nothing else. But what is domestic courtesy but the breath of heliotropes and roses at home? It is as much for your own pleasure that you should be pleasant, as it is for that of others. The happiest household in the world is that in which the wishes of the thoughtful mother are made the laws of conduct, and where courtesy is new every morning and fresh every evening, like the celestial benediction.

How many of us, brethren and sisters, make home the rag-bag of ill-humors and caprices, and wretched moods of every kind, while we carefully hide them from the stranger? When the guest arrives, we slide a chair over the rent in the carpet, and slip a tidy over the worn edge of the sofa-cushion, and lay a prettily bound book over the ink-stain on the parlor table-cloth; and so at his coming the flying hair is smoothed, and the sullen look is gilded with a smile, and the sour tone is suddenly wonderfully sweet. Shriveled old autumn blooms in a moment into rosy spring. And how, as this mother writes—how is a youth to know that this house, where everything seems to smile, is not always as warm and sunny as he finds it? Yet this young woman, so neatly dressed, so quietly mannered, so fascinating to the young man, may be the most “inefficient” of human beings.—Harper’s Magazine.