and looking back and seeing the
emptiness and the littleness of the other life as compared with this,
you will bless the time that your better judgment prevailed and saved
you from it. Or, if you chance to be in it already, delay not, but
commence now to build upon this true foundation.

Instead of discharging your footman, as did a woman of whom I chance to
know, because he finally refused to stand in the rain by the side of her
carriage, with his arms folded just so, standing immovable like a mummy
(I had almost said like a fool), daring to look neither to one side nor
the other, but all the time in the direction of her so-called ladyship,
while she spent an hour or two in doing fifteen or twenty minutes'
shopping in her desire to make it known that this is Mrs. Q.'s carriage,
and this is the footman that goes with it,--instead of doing this, give
him an umbrella if necessary, and take him to aid you as you go on your
errands of mercy and cheer and service and loving kindness to the
innumerable ones all about you who so stand in need of them.

Is there any comparison between the appellation "Lady Bountiful" and "a
proud, selfish, pleasure-seeking woman"? And, much more, do you think
there is any comparison whatever between the real pleasure and happiness
and satisfaction in the lives of the two?

* * * * *

Is it the ambition of your life to _accumulate great wealth_, and thus
to acquire a great name, and along with it happiness and satisfaction?
Then remember that whether these will come to you will depend _entirely_
upon the use and disposition you make of your wealth. If you regard it
as a _private trust_ to be used for the highest good of mankind, then
well and good, these will come to you. If your object, however, is to
pile it up, to hoard it, then neither will come; and you will find it a
life as unsatisfactory as one can live.

There is, there can be, no greatness in things, in material things, of
themselves. The greatness is determined entirely by the use and
disposition made of them. The greatest greatness and the only _true_
greatness in the world is unselfish love and service and self-devotion
to one's fellow-men.

Look at the matter carefully, and tell me candidly if there can be
anything more foolish than a man's spending all the days of his life
piling up and hoarding money, too mean and too stingy to use any but
what is absolutely necessary, accumulating many times