For every good deed of ours the world will be better always. And perhaps on no day does a man walk the street cheerfully without meeting some other person who is brightened by his face, and who unconsciously to himself catches from that look an ineffable something—an inspiration that gives him new courage and saves him from a wrong action. Usefulness, after all, is nobler than fame—so noble, indeed, that man should not demand a higher reward for his labors under the sun than the consciousness of having done his neighbor some form of service. Every person who has lived in the past, who lives in the present or may hereafter come into being, either has exerted or will exert some influence for the good or ill of his fellows. Even in inanimate nature this seems to be the law of existence. The glacier, that had its beginning when the earth was new, carries in its icy grasp objects which today tell the story of its course as plainly as if by written or spoken word. The tree standing by the wayside, barren of either flower or fruit and seemingly useless, may have a beneficent office. Some tired and lonely traveler, discouraged and disheartened, resting beneath its shade, may be lured back to a life of usefulness and happiness by the song of a bird in its branches. And so it is too in the animal kingdom. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the air in divers ways make their impress upon nature and upon all life. “When our souls shall leave this dwelling, The glory of one fair and virtuous action Is above all the ’scutcheons of our tomb.” APPENDIX C THE MAN WHO DID ME A GOOD TURN _Written by Dr. Frank Crane_ Is there any feeling quite like that with which you pick up the Morning Paper? You yourself, child of mystery, have just come from a brief visit with Death, in the house of Sleep, and are upon the stoop of another Day, and when you look at the Paper, it is as if your hand lay upon the latch that opens the Door of another Room in that great House of Adventure—Life. What will you see? Kings fallen? New wonders of strange lands? Another crime? What new shifting in the kaleidoscope of Fate? The other day I read that Harlow N. Higinbotham, sometime President of the World’s Columbian Exposition, man of affairs, wealth, business, and philanthropy, had died. At eighty-two years of age, still active and vigorous, he had fallen beneath an automobile in the street. This is not the story of his life. Others will write his biography. They will tell of his plans, achievements, honors. But certain men, to you, are types. They are symbols. Whatever may be their order in the usual chronicle of the world, to you they stand for a point of sentiment, a mark of an idea. Harlow N. Higinbotham will always be to me the concrete representative and ikon of “The Man Who Did Me a Good Turn.”