I don't care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right. - P. T. Barnum

Like most people in Connecticut in those days, I was brought up to attend church regularly on Sunday, and long before I could read I was a prominent scholar in the Sunday school. My good mother taught me my lessons in the New Testament and the Catechism, and my every effort was directed to win one of those “Rewards of Merit,” which promised to pay the bearer one mill, so that ten of these prizes amounted to one cent, and one hundred of them, which might be won by faithful assiduity every Sunday for two years, would buy a Sunday school book worth ten cents. Such were the magnificent rewards held out to the religious ambition of youth.

The best kind of charity is to help those who are willing to help themselves. Promiscuous almsgiving, without inquiring into the worthiness of the applicant, is bad in every sense. But to search out and quietly assist those who are struggling for themselves, is the kind that “scattereth and yet increaseth.

The inordinate love of money, no doubt, may be and is the root of all evil, but money itself, when properly used, is not only a handy thing to have in the house, but affords the gratification of blessing our race by enabling its possessor to enlarge the scope of human happiness and human influence.