"SHUT YOUR OWN GATE BEHIND YOU!”-

Dunstan Times, Issue 918, 21 November 1879, Page 3

"SHUT YOUR OWN GATE BEHIND YOU!”-

When you leave your garden, fruit patch, or grounds, of whatever kind, shut the gate, and leave whatever is behind it, there —don’t take it with you. Recollect that when you visit the place of another, you go to 8"e what he has to show, and learn what he has to teach. If you would be a welcome visitor, and be dismissed with a pressure invitation to come again, place yourself in a receptive mood ; be for the time the attentive pupil, and not the teacher. When Others visit your place will be the proper time to teach. Of all the intolerable bores who visit us is the man who brings his own place with him, anil who, whatever may be shown him, at mice institutes a comparison With his own, and begins to tell yon that “ mine are much better than that,” “ I can beat yon on so and so, and ignoring the thing before him tells ns, “Ah, you should see my strawberries,” “ my roses,” “ my tomatoes,” and so on all through—in, short, the man who does not “ shut his own gate behind him ” Those who are so thoroughly satisfied with their own that they cannot forget it for a few hours should not visit, hut remain upon the scene of their remarkable achievements—at home. We would not imply that one m visiting the grounds of another may not, on occasion, drop a useful hint drawn from his own experience, nr that he may not give his host any information that he may ask for. But we have been so annoyed at receiving visitors, and worse still, in visiting strange grounds in comnany with those "'hose only object in visiting appears to be to boast of their own affairs, that we feel called upon to protest against it. Those who thoughtlessly fall into this unpleasant error need only to be reminded of it, and they will sensibly avoid it. From the chronic boaster of his own achievements we hope to be delivered.—o ir lcn.