Doing good by stealth, and having it found out by accident.

“This,” said Charles Lamb, “is the greatest pleasure I know.”  “Money never yet made a man happy,” said Franklin; “and there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness.”  To do good with it, makes life a delight to the giver.  How happy, then, was the life of Jean Ingelow, since what she received from the sale of a hundred thousand copies of her poems, and fifty thousand of her prose works, she spent largely in charity; one unique charity being a “copyright” dinner three times a week to twelve poor persons just discharged from the neighboring hospitals!  Nor was any one made happier by it than the poet.

John Buskin inherited a million dollars.  “With this money he set about doing good,” says a writer in the “Arena.”  “Poor young men and women who were struggling to get an education were helped, homes for working men and women were established, and model apartment houses were erected.  He also promoted a work for reclaiming waste land outside of London.  This land was used for the aid of unfortunate men who wished to rise again from the state in which they had fallen through cruel social conditions and their own weaknesses.  It is said that this work suggested to General Booth his colonization farms.  Ruskin has also ever been liberal in aiding poor artists, and has done much to encourage artistic taste among the young.  On one occasion he purchased ten fine water-color paintings by Holman Hunt for $3,750, to be hung in the public schools of London.  By 1877 he had disposed of three-fourths of his inheritance, besides all the income from his books.  But the calls of the poor, and his plans looking toward educating and ennobling the lives of working men, giving more sunshine and joy, were such that he determined to dispose of all the remainder of his wealth except a sum sufficient to yield him $1,500 a year on which to live.”

Our own Peter Cooper, in his last days, was one of the happiest men in America; his beneficence shone in his countenance.

Let the man who has the blues take a map and census table of the world, and estimate how many millions there are who would gladly exchange lots with him, and let him begin upon some practicable plan to do all the good he can to as many as he can, and he will forget to be despondent; and he need not stop short at praying for them without first giving every dollar he can, without troubling the Lord about that.  Let him scatter his flowers as he goes along, since he will never go over the same road again.

No man in England had a better time than did Du Maurier on that cold day when he took the hat of an old soldier on Hampstead road, and sent him away to the soup kitchen in Euston to get warm.  The artist chalked on a blackboard such portraits as he commonly made for “Punch,” and soon gathered a great quantity of small coins for the grateful soldier; who, however, at once rubbed out Du Maurier’s pictures and put on “the faithful dog,” and a battle scene, as more artistic.