Girard believed in labor as a necessity for every human being. He used to say, "No man shall be a gentleman on _my_ money." If he had a son he should labor. He said, "If I should leave him twenty thousand dollars, he would be lazy or turn gambler." Mr. Ingram tells an amusing incident of an Irishman who applied to Mr. Girard for work. "Engaging the man for a whole day, he directed the removal from one side of his yard to the other of a pile of bricks, which had been stored there awaiting some building operations; and this task, which consumed several hours, being completed, he was accosted by the Irishman to know what should be done next. 'Why, have you finished that already?' said Girard; 'I thought it would take all day to do that. Well, just move them all back again where you took them from; that will use up the rest of the day;' and upon the astonished Irishman's flat refusal to perform such fruitless labor, he was promptly paid and discharged, Girard saying at the same time, in a rather aggrieved manner, 'I certainly understood you to say that you wanted _any_ kind of work.'" Absorbed as Mr. Girard was in his business, cold and unapproachable as he seemed to the people of Philadelphia, he had noble qualities, which showed themselves in the hour of need. In the latter part of July, 1793, yellow fever in its most fatal form broke out in Water Street, within a square of Mr. Girard's residence. The city was soon in a panic. Most of the public offices were closed, the churches were shut up, and people fled from the city whenever it was possible to do so. Corpses were taken to the grave on the shafts of a chaise driven by a negro, unattended, and without ceremony. "Many never walked in the footpath, but went in the middle of the streets, to avoid being infected in passing houses wherein people had died. Acquaintances and friends avoided each other in the streets, and only signified their regard by a cold nod. The old custom of shaking hands fell into such disuse that many shrank back with affright at even the offer of a hand. The death-calls echoed through the silent, grass-grown streets; and at night the watcher would hear at his neighbor's door the cry, 'Bring out your dead!' and the dead were brought. Unwept over, unprayed for, they were wrapped in the sheet in which they died, and were hurried into a box, and thrown into a great pit, the rich and the poor together." "Authentic cases are recorded," says Henry W. Arey in his "Girard College and its Founder," "where parent and child and husband and wife died deserted and alone, for want of a little care from the hands of absent kindred."