But he continued, "I say, mother, if we did not have a dollar, we could
still earn our living with our hands at just plain hard work, couldn't
we?"
And the old lady (who really was never old) replied, "Yes, James, we
could still earn our living with our hands, and we would not be
miserable over it, either." Near the close of his wonderful career,
Pericles said, "I have caused no one to wear crape." The Honorable
Marvin Campbell, in a speech at South Bend, once quoted this remark of
the man who built the City of Athens and added, "Not only can we pay
James Oliver the compliment of saying that he never caused any one to
wear crape, but no one ever lost money by investing in either his goods
or his enterprises, and moreover no one ever associated with him who did
not prosper and grow wiser and better through the association."
A few weeks before his passing, some one told him this little story of
Tolstoy's: A priest, seeing a peasant plowing, approached him and said,
"If you knew you were to die tonight, how would you spend the rest of
the day?"