a few of the
more presentable relatives--a merry party! And that is what he has
striven, fought and lied for for fifty years.

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 Hippod