a part which will make you smile. Would you
believe it, my friend, that I have visited as many as
fifteen sick people in a day? and what will surprise you
still more, I have lost only one patient, an Irishman, who
would drink a little. I do not flatter myself that I have
cured one single person; but you will think with me, that in
my quality of Philadelphia physician I have been very
moderate, and that not one of my _confreres_ has killed
fewer than myself."

It is not by nursing the sick, however, that men acquire colossal
fortunes. We revert, therefore, to the business career of this
extraordinary man. Girard, in the ancient and honorable acceptation of
the term, was a merchant; i.e. a man who sent his own ships to foreign
countries, and exchanged their products for those of his own.
Beginning in the West India trade, with one small schooner built with
difficulty and managed with caution, he expanded his business as his
capital increased, until he was the owner of a fleet of merchantmen,
and brought home to Philadelphia the products of every clime.
Beginning with single voyages, his vessels merely sailing to a foreign
port and back again, he was accustomed at length to project great
mercantile cruises, extending over long periods of time, and embracing
many ports. A ship loaded with cotton and grain would sail, for
example, to Bordeaux, there discharge, and take in a cargo of wine and
fruit; thence to St. Petersburg, where she would exchange her wine and
fruit for hemp and iron; then to Amsterdam, where the hemp and iron
would be sold for dollars; to Calcutta next for a cargo of tea and
silks, with which the ship would return to Philadelphia. Such were the
voyages so often successfully made by the Voltaire, the Rousseau, the
Helvetius, and the Montesquieu; ships long the pride of Girard and the
boast of Philadelphia, their names being the tribute paid by the
merchant to the literature of his native land. He seldom failed to
make very large profits. He rarely, if ever, lost a ship.

His neighbors, the merchants of Philadelphia, deemed him a lucky man.
Many of them thought they could do as well as he, if they only had his
luck. But the great volumes of his letters and papers, preserved in a
room of the Girard College, show that his success in business was not
due, in any degree whatever, to good fortune. Let a money-making
generation take note, that Girard principles inevitably