A String of Amber Beads | Page 4

early morning hours and are quickly passed. The forenoon is marked by
lilacs, apple blooms and roses. The day's meridian is reached with lilies,
red carnations, and the dusky splendor of pansies and passion flowers.
Then come the languid poppy and the prim little 4 o'clock, the marigold,
the sweet pea, and later the dahlia and the many-tinted chrysanthemum
to mark the day's decline. Lastly the goldenrod, the aster and the
gentian, tell us it is evening time, and night and frost are close at hand.

The rose hour has struck already for '93. The garden beds are full of
scattered petals and the dusty roadways glimmer with ghostly blossoms
too wan to be roses, and wafted by a breath into nothingness. With such
a calendar to mark the advance of decay and death the seasons differ
from the mortal race which substitutes aches and pains for a horologe
of flowers, and grows old by processes of physical failure and mental
blight.

VII.
SOMETHING BETTER THAN SURFACE MANNERS.
There are days when my heart is so full of love for young girls that as I
pass them on the street I feel myself smiling as one does to walk by a
garden of daffodils. And when I see how careful some of them are to be
circumspect and demure, I think to myself how fine a thing it is, to be
sure, to have good manners! How happy the parent whose young
daughter knows just how to hold her hands in company, just how and
when to smile, just how to enter a room or gracefully leave it. Easy,
indeed, must lie the head of that mother who is secure in the knowledge
that her daughter will never make a false step in the stately minuet of
etiquette, or strike a discordant note in the festival of life; that she will
never laugh too loud, nor turn her head in the street, even when the gay
and glittering "king of the cannibal isles" rides by, nor do anything odd
or queer or unconventional. To the mother who believes that good
manners can be taught in books and conned in dancing schools, there is
something to satisfy the heart's finest craving in a strictly conventional
daughter, who thinks and acts and speaks by rule, and whose life is like
the life of an apricot, canned, or a music box wound up with a key. But
to my thinking, my dear, good manners are not put on and off like
varying fashions, nor done up like sweetmeats, pound for pound, and
kept in the storeroom for state occasions. They strike root from the
heart out, and the prettiest manners in the world are only the
blossoming of a good heart. Surface manners are like cut flowers stuck
in a shallow glass with just enough water to keep them fresh an hour or
so, but the courtesy that has its growth in the heart is like the rosebush

in the garden that no inclement season can kill, and no dark day force to
forego the unfolding of a bud.

VIII.
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.
I am more and more convinced the longer I live that the very best
advice that was ever given from friend to friend is contained in those
four words: "Mind your own business." The following of it would save
many a heartache. Its observance would insure against every sort of
wrangling. When we mind our own business we are sure of success in
what we undertake, and may count upon a glorious immunity from
failure. When the husbandman harvests a crop by hanging over the
fence and watching his neighbor hoe weeds, it will be time for you and
for me to achieve renown in any undertaking in which we do not
exclusively mind our own business. If I had a family of young folks to
give advice to, my early, late and constant admonition would be always
and everywhere to "mind their own business." Thus should they woo
harmony and peace, and live to enjoy something like the completeness
of life.

IX.
THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE ME MOST WEARY.
In the ups and downs and hithers and thithers of an eventful life shall I
tell you the people who have made me the most weary? It is not the bad
people, nor the foolish people; we can get along with all such because
of a streak of common humanity in us all, but I cannot survive without
extreme lassitude the decorous people; those who slip through life
without sound or sparkle, those who behave themselves upon every
occasion, and would pass through a dynamite explosion without
rumpling a hair; those who never have done anything out of the way
and never will, simply for the same reason