Dreams, Real Charity

Evening Round-Up
by William Crosbie Hunter

(Page 8 of 14)

Dreams

Hitch Your Wagon to a Star, and Stay Hitched

The great colleges are just now turning out their thousands of graduates and the great newspapers have much sport ridiculing them with funny pictures.

Every great man was once a boy with a dream, and that dream came true because the boy had pep that made him stick to his ambition and kept him from being discouraged because of ridicule or obstacles.

Thomas Carlyle, the poor Scotch tutor, dreamed he wanted to be a great author. His clothes were threadbare, his poverty apparent; friends taunted and ridiculed him until, goaded to indignation, he cried, "I have better books in me than you have ever read." The crowd laughed and said, "poor fellow, he's daffy in the head."

Carlyle stuck to his dream and the world has the "History of Frederick the Great" and the "French Revolution" and "Sartor Resartus." When he had finished the manuscript of the "French Revolution" a careless maid built a fire with it. He wasn't discouraged, but went to work and wrote it over again and very likely better than he wrote it the first time.

Bonaparte in the garden of his military school dreamed of being a great general. He stuck to his dream and he realized his hopes.

Joseph Pulitzer, a poor emigrant, crawled in a cellar way to sleep in New York, and he dreamed of owning a great newspaper. His dream came true and the newspaper is printed in a building erected on the spot where he dreamed in the cellar way.

Livingston dreamed of exploring darkest Africa; his dream came true.

Edison dreamed of great electrical discoveries. His monument is Menlo Park with its great laboratories.

Ford dreamed of making an automobile for the purse-limited masses - he was jeered; today the world cheers him.

My friend Bert Perrine was chucked off a stage in the middle of Idaho's great sage brush desert. He said to the driver, "Some day I'll own that stage and I'll use it for a chicken house."

He dreamed and schemed and today the desert is the famous Twin Falls country, blossoming like a rose, and on his beautiful ranch at Blue Lakes that old stage is used for a chicken house.

Rockefeller dreamed, Lincoln dreamed, so did Garfield, Wilson, Grant, Clay, Webster, Marshall Field, Richard W. Sears and all the other men who have done things worth while in the world.

The great West is the result of dreams come true.

Dream on, my boy; hitch your wagon to a star and stay hitched. That dream and that determination are the things that are to carry you over obstacles, past thorny ways, and through criticism, jeers and ridicule.

Your time will come. Dream and scheme, and make your ideals materialize into living, pulsating realities.

Real Charity

Let Me Help Where I Am Rather Than Help in Siam

There are many persons who act and advocate ideals merely for effect - they are hypocrites.

Here's a little true heart story that probably passed unnoticed excepting to a very few persons.

Little Spencer Nelson, a poor boy, eight years old, recently died in a hospital with a little bank clasped to his breast. The bank had $3.41 in pennies the boy had saved to buy presents for poor children.

The little hero had fought manfully through three months' suffering, enduring the torture of five lacerating operations. The pain failed to dim his spirit of unselfishness that burned brightly and clearly in his tired, fever-racked body.

After each operation his mind became more securely fixed on his project to help bring cheer to poor children.

A little savings bank was his companion and each visitor was asked to contribute to his fund.

Three hours before he died a smile beautified his thin wasted face as the nurse dropped a dime in his bank. His last words were to his mother and the message was in a scarcely audible whisper, asking her to remember to use the money to make poor children happy.

That was real charity; that boy had no hypocrisy in his heart.

The daily paper chronicles sensational charity, where men vie with each other to see who can give most and get the most advertising. They overlook the wonderful love and charity they are capable of, if they would look into out-of-the-way places and get direct connection with pain and suffering.

Little Spencer looked from his cot and saw the suffering of other little children and he wanted to help them, and the very resolve and impulse made him forget his own pains and misery.

In the Book of Good Deeds the name of Spencer Nelson will be recorded as a sweeter act of charity than any million-dollar gift to a great institution.

What one of you who read these lines can read the story of that little hero and not be touched by the generous love and beautiful conception of charity he possessed.

He did not need sensational stories in newspapers or solicitors of charitable organizations to stir him to action.

He found opportunity at his door, close at home, near by, where all of us can find it if we only look.

I don't believe much in this far-away charity idea so many have.

I believe in helping those near where I am rather than sending money to Siam.

It may be a pleasurable sensation for you to contribute fifty dollars to a missionary scheme in Siam, and get the Missionary report of the budget made up from the foreign missionary fund.

I know that a bucket of coal in an empty stove, a basket of bread and liberal hunk of round steak to the starving family around the corner brings the donor a better sensation.

Take a trip to the hospitals, learn about the homes of the suffering patients in the charity ward, and you will resolve it's a better act to send flour to the poor than flowers to the rich.

Little Spencer Nelson had the right idea of charity: definite, immediate help to those he could reach right where he was, rather than sending money to sufferers far, far away.

Let your gifts be principally flour and beef; they help those who need help. Flowers are all right in their place, but there are more places where flour can be used to better purpose.

I'm keener for filling the coffee can of my suffering neighbor than filling the coffers of the big charity five thousand miles away.

I try to help both ways, but the home help pays the bigger dividends. What do you think about it?

Published by Hunter Service Kansas City, Mo., USA
Copyright 1915 by WM. C. Hunter