Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 9, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1876 — The Miser and the Spendthrift. [ARTICLE]

The Miser and the Spendthrift.

The miser digs his heart out hollow to stow away his money in. He is, if possible, a bigger tool (ban the drunkard; he loves money simply because it is money, while the drunkard loves whisky for the fun he says there is in it. Misers almost always live to be old, and grow miserly to the last They accumulate by little#, and their hearts never open only on a crack, and only then to lot in another shilling. There is no condition of life free from this base passion, the highest as well as the lowest, those of the most mental capacity and those of the least. An old miser Is a sad enough sight, but next to an idiot, a young miser is the most revolting spectacle of all. Misers enjoy what they don’t use, lose what they save, and die possessed of the only treasure that is of no use to them. The most terrible sarcasm is a miser's funeral, for the heir often makes it gorgeous and expensive, and then pitches headlong into the pile the old fool has left. Next to hoarding up money and never spending it comes the folly of spending it foolishly. It is a sad sight to see a fine fortune wildly wasted by one who never earned a cent of it, and whose only ambition is to see how quick he can make a pauper of himself.

Spendthrifts are never generous, they are more often avaricious; I have known them to be reckless in public, and as mean as misers in private. It is seldom that men waste the substance that they have heaped up themselves, and when a spendthrift gits poor, he is one of the beat images of poverty we have. These men upver care to make any friends when they have wealth, and when they become beggars are deserted by everybody One hour of a spendthrift’s remorse at what he calls the ingratitude of the world is more than an offset to all he has ever enjoyed during the fury of his wastefulness. He who wantonly wastes his estate ministers more to his vanity than to his happiness, and what looks like noble-heart-edneas in him, if you will examine closely, will prove to be only a miserly selfishness. There are no two persons on earth who despise each other more than the miser and the spendthrift, and certainly there are no two whose example is much worse, and who do so little good with the means they have for benefiting mankind.— Josh Bidings, in N. Y. Weekly.