Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/133

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GOLD FOR SILVER.
125

call money, but for the real treasures of the heart—affection, kindliness, charity, help to the needy, sympathy with the sorrowful, protection to the weak, and encouragement to the forlorn. The silver I had in return has been left long ago on earth: perhaps there was barely enough to make a plate for my coffin; but the gold I gave is in my own possession still, and has been beaten into a crown for me in heaven.

Yes. "It is better to give than to receive." With few exceptions the great benefactors of mankind have been in this world defrauded of their wages. Columbus died perhaps the poorest man in the whole kingdom he had spent his life-time to enrich. Socrates sold the treasures of his intellect—the deductions of the greatest mind in antiquity—for a draught of hemlock on a prison floor. The fable of Prometheus has been enacted over and over again. Those