Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 160, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 July 1910 — TRUE COURTESY. [ARTICLE]

TRUE COURTESY.

A member of the Society of Friends, who had made a fortune as a mercnant, was asked how he had managed it. “By a single article,” he answered, “in which every one may deal who pleases—civility.” The Rev. E. J. Hardy, in his hook, “How to be Happy Though Civil,” gives an incident from the life of Lord Beaconsfield, an apt Illustration of the oharm which the spirit of chivalry infuses into everyday life. Gladstone was attacking in the House of Commons the administration of Beaconsfield, or rather of Dißraeli, as he was then. He had begun a sentence, “The right honorable gentleman and his satellites,” when some interruption threw him out. He came to a stop, and seemed on the point of breaking down. Disraeli leaned across the table and repeated the word “satellites," whereupon his adversary at once recollected himself and resumed his Invective. Civility has been defined as benevolence In small things. This is well illustrated by an anecdote told of Gen. William Napier. Taking a country walk one day, he met a little girl, about five-years old, sobbing over a broken bowl, which she had dropped in bringing it back from the field to which she had taken her father’s dinner. She said she would be beaten on her return home for having broken it. With a sudden gleam of hope, she Innocently looked up into his face and said, “But zu ca mend It,.can’t ’ee?” He explained that he could not mend the bowl, but he would give her a sixpence to buy another. However, on opening his purse it was empty of silver, and he had to make amends by promising to meet his little friend in the same spot at the same hour the next day, and to bring the sixpence with him, bidding her tell her mother she had seen a gentleman who would bring her the money for the bowl the next day. The > child, trusting him, went on her way comforted. On his return hopie, he found an invitation to dine the following evening with some one whom he especially wished to see. He hesitated for some little time, trying to calculate the possibility of going to meet his little friend of the broken bowl and still being in time for the dinner party; but finding this could not be, he wrote to decline the dinner invitation, on the plea Sf a previous engagement, saying, "I cannot disappoint her. She trusted me Implicitly.”