Only the other day I picked up a trade journal and in it was a short letter from one business man about another business man who had recently passed away. Let me quote a part of it:
Away back in the '80's I met him under the following circumstances. I was then in Chicago and although an invalid was well enough to assist my brother a little in his office work.
One day a stranger came in who received an especially cordial greeting from both my brother and his partner. It proved to be Harry W. Sommers.
He was, for a short time, a daily visitor and when he came in there seemed to come with him a glow of sunshine.
It made the same impression upon me as it does sometimes, after a long period of rain and cloudiness, when the sun, in all its brightness, suddenly bursts forth.
One day he came to bid my brother good-by, and although it is twenty-one years ago, the wave of his hand, the cheery smile and the hearty good-by, as he looked toward me, still linger in my memory.
Many a time since has he come into my mind, although I never saw him afterward, accompanied with the thought that were there more Harry Sommerses in this world, it would be a brighter and far happier place to dwell.
I would far rather leave a legacy like that behind me than to leave an immense fortune over which my heirs would quarrel and go to law and engender ill feelings and then possibly spend in an injurious manner.
It is said of Sister Dora, the noble-hearted woman who gave her life to the iron workers of the "Black Country" in England, that as she went to and fro in the wards of the hospitals, her presence was like a glad burst of sunshine to the poor sick men and women to whom she ministered. Though they were rough, uncouth, even profane and wicked, she never failed in her courtesy and bright cheerfulness, and the result was that patients under her control regained their health far more rapidly than those who were subjected to the depressing influences of moody, cheerless, censorious persons.