Your ShelfYour Projects

HOSPITALITY

50%

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 6, 1881

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 7, No. 38.

Read the full edition

HOSPITALITY.

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

I PRAY YOU, O excellent wife, not to cumber yourself and me to provide a rich dinner for this man or this woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bed-chamber made ready at too great a cost. But let this stranger see, if he will, in your looks, in your accents and behaviour, your heart and earnestness, your thought and will, what he cannot buy at any price, at any village or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles and dine sparingly and sleep hard in order to behold. Certainly let the board be spread and the bed be dressed for the traveler, but let the emphasis of hospitality be in these things. Honor to the house where they are simple to the verge of hardship, so that the intellect is awake, the soul worships truth and love, and that honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.—Emerson.