Sri Sai Baba`S:Charters And Sayings

330 TALKS ON (< AT THE FEET OF THE MASTER n

done differently from the way in which they are
ordinarily done. Any ordinary man writes his letters
sometimes in a rather slipshod way. Perhaps they
do not look quite as nice as they might, and he signs
them nevertheless. He says what he has to say
perhaps briefly and to the point, perhaps otherwise.
At any rate, he says it without any special effort to
see that it is well done. It appears to be quite a new
light to some people that ordinary little matters like
that in daily life ought to be well done. It is not the
custom for people to do them well. You can see that
from your own ordinary correspondence. I get a
number of letters and I must say that many of those
are not such as I should dream of sending out myself.
A vast amount of my correspondence I should be
ashamed to send out. Letters will often be faulty in
expression, badly written,—often so badly written
that it wastes a great deal of my time trying to
decipher them ; if type-written, many mistakes in the
typing; if written by hand, many mistakes in that
way. That appears to be the common way of doing
anything, doing it just anyhow. It may not matter
verv much for the outsider, but you know it does
matter for us. It is emphatically our duty to do
whatever we do decently well. I do not mean to say
that you can always spare the time to write every
thing like copper-plate, or that you have always time
to make a finished work of art of every letter that
you write. It cannot be done in these days, but I do