azed look
on the faces of the little crowd. It was almost as if something
supernatural had happened. All eyes turned quickly to catch sight of
that strange young man; but he was already far off striding swiftly up
the street. I have often regretted that I checked my impulse to catch up
with him--for it seemed to me, too, that I had never seen a stranger
thing. Pity or whim or whatever it was, did ever a millionaire do the
like with a dollar, create such a sensation or have so much fun with so
small a sum? No; millionaires never have fancies like that.

Another poor man's fancy is that of a friend of mine, a very poor young
lawyer, whose custom it is to walk uptown from his office at evening,
studying the faces of the passers-by. He is too poor to afford dollar
bills. He must work his miracles with twenty-five-cent pieces, or even
smaller coins; but it is with this art of spending money as with any
other art: the greatness of the artist is shown by his command over an
economy of material; and the amount of human happiness to be evoked by
the dispensation of a quarter into the carefully selected hand, at the
artistically chosen moment, almost passes belief. Suppose, for example,
you were a sandwich man on a bleak winter day, an old weary man, with
hope so long since faded out of your heart that you would hardly know
what the word meant if you chanced to read it in print. Thought, too, is
dead within you, and feeling even so numbed that you hardly suffer any
more. Practically you are a man who ought to be in your coffin--at peace
in Potter's field--who, by the mere mechanic habit of existence,
mournfully parades the public streets, holding up a banner with some
strange device, the scoff of the pitiless wayfarer--as like as not
supporting against an empty stomach the savoury advertisement of some
newly opened restaurant. Suppose you were that man, and suddenly through
the thick hopelessness, muffling you around as with a spiritual
deafness, there should penetrate a kind voice saying: "Try and keep up
your heart, friend; there are better days ahead"; and with the voice a
hand slipping into yours a coin, and with both a kind smile, a cheery
"Good-bye," and a tall, broad-shouldered figure, striding with long, so
to say, kindly legs up the street--gone almost before you knew he was
there. I think it would hardly matter to you whether the coin were a
quarter or a dime; but what would matter would be your amazement that
there sti