Often he has told me of the early days, when he worked from seven until six, and then studied in night school until eleven; and of the later ones when he and his wife lived, like ourselves, in a Fourteenth Street lodging house and saved up to go to the theater once a month.  As a young man he swore he would have a million before he died.  Sunday afternoons he would go up to the Vanderbilt house on Fifth Avenue and, shaking his fist before the ornamental iron railing, whisper savagely that he would own just such a house himself some day.  When he got his million he was going to retire.  But he got his million at the age of forty-five, and it looked too small and mean; he would have ten—­then he would stop!

By fifty-five he had his ten millions.  It was comparatively easy, I believe, for him to get it.  But still he was not satisfied.  Now he has twenty.  But apart from his millions, his house and his pictures, which are bought for him by an agent on a salary of ten thousand dollars a year, he has nothing!  I dine with him out of charity.

Well, recently Johnson has gone into charity himself.  I am told he has given away two millions!  That is an exact tenth of his fortune.  He is a religious man—­in this respect he has outdone most of his brother millionaires.  However, he still has an income of over a million a year—­enough to satisfy most of his modest needs.  Yet the frugality of a lifetime is hard to overcome, and I have seen Johnson walk home—­seven blocks—­in the rain from his club rather than take a cab, when the same evening he was giving his dinner guests peaches that cost—­in December—­two dollars and seventy-five cents apiece.

The question is:  How far have Johnson’s two millions made him a charitable man?  I confess that, so far as I can see, giving them up did not cost him the slightest inconvenience.  He merely bought a few hundred dollars’ worth of reputation—­as a charitable millionaire—­at a cost of two thousand thousand dollars.  It was—­commercially—­a miserable bargain.  Only a comparatively few people of the five million inhabitants of the city of New York ever heard of Johnson or his hospital.  Now that it has been built, he is no longer interested.  I do not believe he actually got as much satisfaction out of his two-million-dollar investment as he would get out of an evening at the Hippodrome; but who can say that he is not charitable?

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I lay stress on this matter of charity because essentially the charitable man is the good man.  And by good we mean one who is of value to others as contrasted with one who is working, as most of us are, only for his own pocket all the time.  He is the man who is such an egoist that he looks on himself as a part of the whole world and a brother to the rest of mankind.  He has really got an exaggerated ego and everybody else profits by it in consequence.