Affability at Home

Audubon, the great ornithologist, with gun and pencil, went through the forests of America to bring down and to sketch the beautiful birds, and after years of toil and exposure completed his manuscript, and put it in a trunk in Philadelphia for a few days of recreation and rest, and came back and found that the rats had utterly destroyed the manuscript; but without any discomposure and without any fret or bad temper, he again, picked up his gun and pencil, and visited again all the great forests of America, and reproduced his immortal work. And yet there are people with the ten-thousandth part of that loss who are utterly unreconcilable, who at the loss of a pencil or an article of raiment will blow as long and sharp as a northeast storm.

Now, that man who is affable in public and who is irritable in private is making a fraudulent over-issue of stock, and he is as bad as a bank that might have four or five hundred thousand dollars of bills in circulation with no specie in the vault. Let us learn to show piety at home. If we have it not there, we have it not anywhere. If we have not genuine grace in the family circle, all our outward and public plausibility merely springs from a fear of the world or from the slimy, putrid pool of our own selfishness. I tell you the home is a mighty test of character. What you are at home you are everywhere, whether you demonstrate it or not. — TALMAGE.