of their final destination.  The surrogate’s courts are filled with legal quarrels.  If a philanthropist has any pride of intellect, and desires to help Christian institutions, he had better bestow the gift before death, for the trouble is, if he leaves any large amount to Christian institutions, the courts will be appealed to to prove he was crazy.  They will bring witnesses to prove that for a long time he has been becoming imbecile, and as almost every one of positive nature has idiosyncrasies, these idiosyncrasies will be brought out on the trial, and ventilated and enlarged and caricatured, and the man who had mind enough to make $1,000,000, and heart enough to remember needy institutions, will be proved a fool.  If he have a second wife, the children of the first wife will charge him with being unduly influenced.  Many a man who, when he made his will, had more brain than all his household put together, has been pronounced a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.  Be your own executor.  Do not let the benevolent institutions of the country get their chief advantage from your last sickness and death.  How much better, like Peter Cooper, to walk through the halls you have built for others and see the young men being educated by your beneficence, and to get the sublime satisfaction of your own charities!  I do not wonder that Barzillai, the wealthy Gileadite, lived to be eighty, for he stood in the perpetual sunshine of his beneficence.  I do not wonder that Peter Cooper, the modern Barzillai, lived to be ninety-two years of age, for he felt the healthful reaction of helping others.  Doing good was one of the strongest reasons of his longevity.  There is many a man with large estate behind him who calls up his past dollars as a pack of hounds to go out and hunt up one more dollar before he dies.  Away away the hunter and his hounds for that last dollar!  Hotter and hotter the chase.  Closer on the track and closer.  Whip up and spur on the steed!  The old man just ahead, and all the pack of hounds close after him.  Now they are coming in at the death, that last dollar only a short distance ahead.  The old hunter, with panting breath and pale cheek and outstretched arm, clutches for it as it turns on its track, but, missing it, keeps on till the exhausted dollar plunges into a hole and burrows and burrows deep; and the old hunter, with both hands, claws at the earth, and claws deeper down, till the burrowed embankment gives way, and he rolls over into his own grave.  We often talk of old misers.  There are but few old misers.  The most of them are comparatively young.  Avarice massacres more than a war.  In contrast, behold the philanthropist in the nineties, and dying of a cold caught in going to look after the affairs of the institution he himself founded, and which has now about two thousand five hundred persons a day in its reading-rooms and libraries, and two thousand students in its evening schools.