Don't Make a Fuss

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 7, 1865

Don't Make a Fuss.

By all the motives which have weight with man or woman, be adjured, not in any case, to make a fuss. In the first place, it never does a bit of good. You can accomplish all you intend, and obtain all you desire, quite as well without it, if not a little better. Nay, sometimes, it actually prevents your succeeding, where you certainly might have done so, had you kept cool, and not forewarned and forearmed everybody by a cannonade.

In the second place, it is exceedingly annoying to others; there is neither peace nor comfort in the neighborhood of a fusser. He is always plaguing you to know if you think it will rain next week, when he is going to the white mountains; or dreading that the cars will run off the track, or the omnibusses break down, or the hotels be crowded, or some such imaginary trouble, ever so long beforehand. And, when fairly started on such an excursion, a fusser destroys all the comfort and enjoyment of his unfortunate companions, and makes his own fancied torments real ones to them. Therefore his company is sedulously avoided.

Thirdly, no one sympathizes with a fusser. Even other fussers have no fellow-feeling with it. The word (and a most expressive one it is,) means worrying over trifles; and who cares a straw if Mrs. Briggs did lose her bandbox, which contained her French bonnet? or if Mr. Brown's bedroom was invaded by a shaggy dog that wouldn't go out, so that it quite worried him to death, and made him quite nervous, as he pathetically declares? Nobody cares whether you or I could not sleep because the rats run over our heads all night, or because we had such startled dreams, or such a bad pain in our shoulder, etc. People don't like to have their sympathies appealed to for such nonsense.

Fourthly, it is decidedly vulgar and incompatible with the dignity of a true lady or gentleman. It was an apt remark that a well-bred hostess will not move a muscle, even when John upsets the best china.