The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain (good book recommendations .TXT) 📕

get access without first passing through an outwork where several young colored men stood guard and carried in the cards and requests and brought back the regrets. Three of the communicating rooms were for consultations, and they were seldom unoccupied. Men sat in them waiting⁠—men who were there by appointment⁠—appointments not loosely specified, but specified by the minute hand of the clock. These rooms had ground-glass doors and their privacy was in other ways protected and secured. Mr. Rogers consulted with a good many men in those rooms in the course of his day’s work of six hours; and whether the matter in hand was small and simple or great and complicated, it was discussed and dispatched with marvelous celerity. Every day these consultations supplied a plenty of vexations and exasperations for Mr. Rogers⁠—I know this quite well⁠—but if ever they found revealment in his face or manner it could have been for only a moment or two, for the signs were gone when he re-entered his private office and he was always his brisk and cheerful self again and ready to be chaffed and joked, and reply in kind. His spirit was often heavily burdened, necessarily, but it cast no shadow, and those about him sat always in the sunshine.

Sometimes the value of his securities went down by the million, day after day, sometimes they went up as fast, but no matter which it was, the face and bearing exhibited by him were only proper to a rising market. Several times every day Miss Harrison had to act in a diplomatic capacity. Men called whose position in the world was such that they could not be dismissed with the formula “engaged” along with Mr. Rogers’s regrets, and to these Miss Harrison went out and explained, pleasantly and tactfully, and sent them away comfortable. Mr. Rogers transacted a vast amount of business during his six hours daily, but there always seemed time enough in the six hours for it.

That Boston gas lawsuit came on at a bad time for Mr. Rogers, for his health was poor and remained so during several months. Every now and then he had to stay in his country house at Fair Haven, Massachusetts, a week or two at a time, leaving his business in Miss Harrison’s hands and conferring with her once or twice daily by long-distance telephone. To prepare himself for the witness stand was not an easy thing, but the materials for it were to be had, for Mr. Rogers never destroyed a piece of paper that had writing on it, and, as he was a methodical man, he had ways of tracing out any paper he needed, no matter how old it might be. The papers needed in the gas suit, wherein Mr. Rogers was sued for several millions of dollars, went back in date a good many years and were numberable by the hundreds; but Miss Harrison ferreted them all out from the stacks and bales of documents in the Standard Oil vaults and caused them to be listed and annotated by the other secretaries. This work cost weeks of constant labor, but it left Mr. Rogers in shape to establish for himself an unsurpassable reputation as a witness.

I wish to make a momentary digression here and call up an illustration of what I have been saying about Mr. Rogers’s habits in the matter of order and system. When he was a young man of twenty-four, out in the oil regions of Pennsylvania and straitened in means, he had some business relations with another young man; time went on, they separated and lost sight of each other. After a lapse of twenty years this man’s card came in one day and Mr. Rogers had him brought into the private office. The man showed age, his clothes showed that he was not prosperous, and his speech and manner indicated that hard luck had soured him toward the world and the fates. He brought a bill against Mr. Rogers, oral in form, for $1,500⁠—a bill thirty years old. Mr. Rogers drew the check and gave it to him, saying he could not allow him to lose it, though he almost deserved to lose it for risking the claim thirty years without presenting it. When he was gone Mr. Rogers said:

“My memory is better than his. I paid the money at the time; knowing this, I know I took a receipt, although I do not remember that detail. To satisfy myself that I have not been careless, I will have that receipt searched out.”

It took a day or two, but it was found and I saw it; then it was sent back to its place again among the archives.

Henry H. Rogers (Continued)

Added in 1909

The value of his advice⁠—His beautiful nature.

Since he passed from life many months have gone by, and still I have not found myself competent to put into words my feelings for him and my estimate of him. For he is as yet too near, the restraint of his spirit too effective.

All through my life I have been the easy prey of the cheap adventurer. He came, he lied, he robbed, and went his way, and the next one arrived by the next train and began to scrape up what was left. I was in the toils of one of these creatures sixteen years ago, and it was Mr. Rogers who got me out. We were strangers when we met, and friends when we parted, half an hour afterward. The meeting was accidental and unforeseen, but it had memorable and fortunate consequences for me. He dragged me out of that difficulty, and also out of the next one⁠—a year or two later⁠—which was still more formidable than its predecessor. He did these saving things at no cost to my self-love, no hurt to my pride; indeed, he did them with so delicate an art that I almost seemed to have done them myself. By no sign, no hint, no word did he ever betray any consciousness that I was under obligations to