no curiosity to appease, no tastes to indulge.  What he once said of himself appeared to be true, that he rose in the morning with but a single object, and that was to labor so hard all day as to be able to sleep all night.  The world was absolutely nothing to him but a working-place.  He scorned and scouted the opinion, that old men should cease to labor, and should spend the evening of their days in tranquillity.  “No,” he would say, “labor is the price of life, its happiness, its everything; to rest is to rust; every man should labor to the last hour of his ability.”  Such was Stephen Girard, the richest man who ever lived in Pennsylvania.

This is an unpleasing picture of a citizen of polite and amiable Philadelphia.  It were indeed a grim and dreary world in which should prevail the principles of Girard.  But see what this man has done for the city that loved him not!  Vast and imposing structures rise on the banks of the Schuylkill, wherein, at this hour, six hundred poor orphan boys are fed, clothed, trained, and taught, upon the income of the enormous estate which he won by this entire consecration to the work of accumulating property.  In the ample grounds of Girard College, looking up at its five massive marble edifices, strolling in its shady walks or by its verdant play-grounds, or listening to the cheerful cries of the boys at play, the most sympathetic and imaginative of men must pause before censuring the sterile and unlovely life of its founder.  And if he should inquire closely into the character and career of the man who willed this great institution into being, he would perhaps be willing to admit that there was room in the world for one Girard, though it were a pity there should ever be another.  Such an inquiry would perhaps disclose that Stephen Girard was endowed by nature with a great heart as well as a powerful mind, and that circumstances alone closed and hardened the one, cramped and perverted the other.  It is not improbable that he was one of those unfortunate beings who desire to be loved, but whose temper and appearance combine to repel affection.  His marble statue, which adorns the entrance to the principal building, if it could speak, might say to us, “Living, you could not understand nor love me; dead, I compel at least your respect.”  Indeed, he used to say, when questioned as to his career, “Wait till I am dead; my deeds will show what I was.”

Girard’s recollections of his childhood were tinged with bitterness.  He was born at Bordeaux in 1750.  He was the eldest of the five children of Captain Pierre Girard, a mariner of substance and respectability.  He used to complain that, while his younger brothers were taught at college, his own education was neglected, and that he acquired at home little more than the ability to read and write.  He remembered, too, that at the age of eight years he discovered, to his shame and sorrow, that one of his eyes was blind,—­a circumstance that exposed him to the taunts of his companions.  The