Charles Lamb once said that "the greatest pleasure I know is to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident." If so, then Mitt Romney must be beaming today.

Throughout this election year, I have been puzzled by the strange silence about Romney's history of unobtrusive good deeds. I assumed that Romney himself must have asked his campaign managers to refrain from mentioning them. This may be good Christian manners, but it would have been a potent antidote to the Democrats' poisonous caricature of an aloof millionaire oblivious to the needs of ordinary people.

Now, at the last minute, the secret has been exposed. Last week, in a National Review online post, columnist Deroy Murdock published a brief list of some of Romney's shining moments, including the rescue of a colleague's runaway daughter-a story so dramatic that even Snopes took pains to verify it-and the jet-ski rescue of a drowning family in 2003. Read the article yourself and weep for joy.

Actually, Murdock missed a few, some of which you can find here, here, and here. (I had to coax Google Search to find these; it doesn't seem to want to disclose anything good about Romney.)

Now, in the interests of fair journalism, I will search for gallant and charitable deeds by Barack Obama. Wish me luck!