It was at this time, when many were stricken with fever, that Girard abandoned his business, and offered his services as superintendent of the public hospital. He had Peter Helm for his associate. Girard's business faculty immediately displayed itself. His powers of organization were immense, and the results of his work were soon observed. Order began to reign where everything had before been in confusion. Dirt was conquered by cleanliness. Where there had been wastefulness, there was now thriftiness. Where there had been neglect, there was unremitting attention. Girard saw that every case was properly attended to. He himself attended to the patients afflicted by the loathsome disease, ministered to the dying, and performed the last kind offices for the dead. At last the plague was stayed; and Girard and Helm returned to their ordinary occupations. The visitors of the poor in Philadelphia placed the following minute on their books: "Stephen Girard and Peter Helm, members of the committee, commiserating the calamitous state to which the sick may probably be reduced for want of suitable persons to superintend the hospital, voluntarily offered their services for that benevolent employment, and excited a surprise and satisfaction that can be better conceived than expressed." The results of Stephen Girard's industry and economy may be seen in Philadelphia--in the beautiful dwelling houses, row after row,--but more than all, in the magnificent marble edifice of Girard College. He left the greater part of his fortune for public purposes,--principally to erect and maintain a public library and a large orphanage. It might have been in regard to his own desolate condition, when cast an orphan amongst strangers and foreigners, that he devised his splendid charity for poor, forlorn, and fatherless children. One of the rooms in the college is singularly furnished. "Girard had directed that a suitable room was to be set apart for the preservation of his books and papers; but from excess of pious care, or dread of the next-of kin, all the plain homely man's effects were shovelled into this room. Here are his boxes and his bookcase, his gig and his gaiters, his pictures and his pottery; and in a bookcase, hanging with careless grace, are his braces--old homely knitted braces, telling their tale of simplicity and carefulness."[1] [Footnote 1: _Gentleman's Magazine_, April. 1875. George Dawson on "Niagara and Elsewhere."]