But because Joseph May had resolved not to be rich, was he therefore idle? By no means. For more than forty years he held a place in an insurance office, which gave him a competence for his family. When free from the duties of the office he found enough to do.

He read one or two hours in the morning, and as much in the evening. He was fond of the old English classics and the best historians; Paley, and other moral writers; and was a practical student of "Political Economy." He utterly despised avarice, but unless he had been a systematic economist both of money and time, he never could have accomplished the vast amount of good which he actually did.

He was not able to bestow large donations on public institutions, but he was a valuable friend, promoter, and director of them. His private charities are not to be numbered. Without much trouble he might be traced through every quarter of the city by the footprints of his benefactions. Pensioners came to his door as they do in some countries to the gate of a convent. The worthy poor found in him a friend, and the unworthy he tried to reform.

He suggested to those who were on the verge of poverty, principles of economy and kinds of labour, by which they were enabled to put themselves into a comfortable estate. His aid to those in distress and need was in many cases not merely temporary and limited to single applications, but as extensive as the life and future course of its object, He seemed, indeed, to live by the good emperor's maxim, never to leave any interval between one benevolent act and another.

Joseph May thus exhibited, in a beautiful way, Industry, Economy, and Benevolence, as sister graces. He had his enjoyment of life all the way along, but in a very different manner from a contemporary, Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia.

Stephen commenced life where so many wealthy men have begun, namely, at the very bottom of the hill. He went from France to America as a cabin-boy, when only ten or twelve years of age, without education, excepting a limited acquaintance with the elements of reading and writing. He was willing to perform any labour, however humble and arduous, by which money could be obtained, for he had determined to be rich. With this resolution as firmly fixed as our own Ben Lomond or Skiddaw, he went to work in good earnest-Industry his right hand, and Economy the left.

He adopted, says one of his biographers, that system of business which would most effectually ensure the result he aimed at; making it a fixed principle to practise the most rigid economy; to shut his heart against all the blandishments of life; to stand to the last farthing, if that farthing were his due; to bar out all those impulses which might for small objects take money from his purse; to plead the statute of limitations against a just claim, because he had a right to do so by the law; to use men as mere tools to accomplish his purposes; to pay only what he had contracted to pay to his long-tried and faithful cashier, who had been the cause of much of his good fortune, and when he died in his service, to manifest the most hardened and unnatural indifference to his death, without making the least provision for his family.

The desire of wealth, as the means of influence, was the master-spirit which conquered the soul of Stephen Girard, and paralyzed all other feelings; and it had grown to such strength that sympathy for his kind seldom enlivened the solitude of his frozen heart.

"Drive thy business, or it will drive thee," says Franklin's Poor Richard, and it seems to have been Girard's motto. Up before the morning lark, he soundly rated any of his workmen who permitted him to gain the precedence in time; his life was one of unceasing labour, which allowed but little relaxation, excepting that which was required by nature.

He constantly wore an old coat, cut in the French style, and remarkable only for its antiquity; generally preserving the same garment in constant use for four and five years. Nor did he maintain a costly equipage. An old chair, or chaise, distinguished chiefly for its rickety construction as well as its age, drawn by an indifferent horse, suited to such a vehicle, was used in his daily journey to the Neck, where lay his farm, to the laborious cultivation of which he devoted the greater portion of his leisure time.

But even here, where it might have been supposed that he would exercise the ordinary rites of hospitality, no friend was welcomed with a warm feeling. In one instance an acquaintance was invited to witness his improvements, and was shown to a strawberry-bed, which had been, in the greater part, gleaned of its contents, and told that he might gather the fruit in that bed; when the owner took leave, stating that he must go to work in a neighbouring bed. The acquaintance finding that this tract had been nearly stripped of its fruit by his predecessors, soon strayed

to another tract, which appeared to bear more abundantly, when he was accosted by Mr. Girard-"I told you," said he, "that you might gather strawberries only in that bed.” Such was his hospitality.

The results of his industry, and the economy which seemed at the time so niggardly, may be seen in the city of Philadelphia, in beautiful dwelling-houses-row after row-reared by him and bearing his name, but more than all, in that magnificent marble edifice, Girard College. Who knows how many years this mysterious man—

"The stoic of the mart, a man without a tear"-

who knows how many anxious years he employed in planning and preparing this college for destitute orphans? It might have been in view of his own desolate condition, when cast, a friendless orphan, among strangers and foreigners, that he devised this splendid charity for poor, forlorn, fatherless children; we fear, however, it must rather be ascribed to weak personal vanity. This example by no means furnishes a perfect model, yet it abundantly proves what economy may achieve. Industry and Economy might have been the appropriate inscription upon the marble portico, beneath which stands the statue of Stephen Girard.

Mr. Philip Hone relates the following illustrative anecdote. Several years since, a merchant in the Dutch trade, who had been a resident in New York fifteen or twenty years, had in his possession a silk umbrella of uncommonly large proportions, which attracted the notice of a friend in company, who said to him in jest

"I should not be surprised to hear, that you brought out that umbrella with you from Holland."

"You have guessed right," replied the Dutchman; "I did bring it when I came to this country, and have had it in constant use ever since; but I have sent it once, during the time, to Holland, to be newly covered."

"Now this gentleman was liberal and charitable," adds Mr. Hone, "but he took good care of his umbrella, and died worth a million of dollars." "The fact is," adds an American writer, in commenting on this anecdote, "as a people, we do not practise economy as constantly and as systematically as do many other nations.”

The economy of the Frenchman who wraps the remaining morsels of sugar in a piece of paper, and takes them away in his pocket from the café, seems quite ridiculous, but Monsieur carries this minute economy into all the details of daily life, and is thus able to live a whole year on a sum which would not suffice for more than a single month for a fashionable young merchant in one of our larger cities.

Thrift is the best means of thriving. This is one of the truths which force themselves upon the most simple understandings, when it is almost the only means. Hence, there is no lack of such sayings as, "A pin a day is a groat a year" or that we have already quoted, "Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves." Perhaps the former of these maxims, which bears such strongly marked features of homelier times, may be out of date in these days of inordinate gains and still more inordinate desires; when it seems as if nobody could be satisfied unless he can dig up gold from the soil, and achieve a fortune as by the cast of a lottery. But those that so hasten to be rich, are most frequently doomed to disappointment,