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