s I can show,
let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass
this way again."

The trouble is that some of us keep our kindnesses, or rather the
expression of it, until it is too late.

We should remember--"Do not keep the alabaster box of your love and
tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with
sweetness, speak approvingly cheerful words while their ears can hear
them; the kind things you mean to say when they are gone say before
they go. The flowers you mean to send for their coffins send to
brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends
have alabaster boxes laid away full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy
and affection which they intend to lay over my dead body, I would
rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours, and
open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them while I need
them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a flower and a funeral
without an eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of love and
sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for their
burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the troubled spirit.
Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over life's weary
way."

The Salesman

Selling goods or soliciting requires careful study. The salesman who
makes the greatest success in the long run is the man who has practiced
truth and established himself in the confidence of his customers.

The whirlwind makes a good showing on the start, but, by the law of
compensation, what a man gains in speed he loses in power.

Some customers are slow to open up and extend their confidence to a
salesman. Others make up their minds quickly and express their
preferences.

A great deal of preliminary work can be avoided if the salesman is
tactful on the start. First impressions are lasting, and a salesman
should study carefully his first appearance. He should be neatly but
not flashily dressed. He should be a gentleman above all things. The
gentleman dresses so that later we can not accurately describe the
clothes he wore. It is the flashily dressed salesman we can describe
later on, for his clothes are so out of the ordinary that they are
remarkable in this respect. The flashily dressed salesman is remembered
by his clothes rather than by his personality.

The solicitor should never smoke in the presence of the customer on
first acquaintance. The matter of smoking in a c