A California man got way more than he bargained for after inheriting his mother's collection of porcelain dolls.

Millie Rhinehart passed away last year, leaving her impressive collection of more than 60 dolls to her son, Ray.

But since Ray had no interest in the toys, he took the collection to a local thrift store.

And that's when things got interesting.

"They rushed over to see what was up when they saw my face go white"

Rhinehart gave the dolls to a charity store called the Discovery Shop, which is run by the American Cancer Society.

He left the store knowing he had done a good deed, but got a call back just hours later from an excited employee.

The store's manager, Barbara, says she was looking through the boxes of dolls when she found a lumpy brown envelope.

She opened it, thinking "it might contain shoes for the dolls," but found something much more surprising.

"Two volunteers were working with me, and they rushed over to see what was up when they saw my face go white," she remembered.

A small fortune

Barbara called Rhinehart and told him she had found some money packed in with his dolls, but didn't reveal how much.

"I got a phone  call saying that ... we found an envelope in one of the boxes of the dolls," he explained, "and there seems to be a lot of money in it."

Rhinehart was expecting just $30 or $40, so he was stunned to arrive at the store and find $6,000 waiting for him.

Much of the money was in crisp $100 bills fresh from the bank, and Rhinenhart has no idea what the money was doing stashed with the dolls.

He says he plans to split the surprising payout with his brother, and thanks the Discovery Shop employees for being so honest.

As for the dolls, they've been donated to a local orphanage.

Honesty is the best policy

Surprisingly, this isn't the first time a huge pile of money was left in a thrift store item.

And it's not the first time the store employees were honest about their find either.

Take Kendall Keyes, an assistant manager at a Goodwill in New York who found a purse filled with $39,000.

"I started looking around like, who's setting me up? There's no way," she said about the surprising find.

Keyes later learned a customer's 101-year-old grandmother had stashed her life savings in the purse, and was given $3,900 for her honesty.

Another woman had donated a coat filled with $17,500 by mistake, and gave $1,000 to the honest worker who discovered the missing money.

Would you turn over this much money if you found it? Thankfully, these workers did.

[H/T: Western Journal, ABC 6, UPI]