Chapter IX: Part 9

One year of schoolteaching in New York City, and A. T. Stewart reached his majority. He had saved just two hundred dollars of his salary; and he sailed away, back to Ould Ireland, a successful man. Now he would go back to Trinity and complete his course, and be glorified. He had proved his ability to meet the world on a fair footing and take care of himself. All of which speaks well for young Misther Stewart, and it also speaks well for his grandparents, who had brought him up in a good, sensible way to work, economize and keep a civil tongue in his Irish head. His grandfather didn't exactly belong to the gentry--it was better than that: he was an Irish clerque who had become a scrivener, and then risen to a professorship.

A. T. Stewart was heir to a goodly amount of decent pride, which always kept him in the society of educated people, and made him walk with the crown of his head high and his chin in. He thought well of himself--and the world is very apt to take a man at his own estimate.

A year in "The States" had transformed the young man from a greenhorn into a gentleman. The climate of the West had agreed with him. He himself told how on going back to Belfast the city seemed to have grown smaller and very quiet. He compared everything to Broadway, and smiled at a jaunting-car compared to a 'bus.

When he went to Trinity College, and saw his class, from whom he had parted only a year before, all thought of remaining two years to graduate faded from his mind. An ocean seemed to divide him from both teachers and pupils. The professors were stupid and slow; the pupils were boys--he was a man. They, too, felt the difference, and called him "Sir." And when one of them introduced him to a Freshman as "an American," Freshy bowed low, and the breast of A. T. Stewart expanded with pride. Not even the offer of a professorship could have kept him in Ireland. He saw himself the principal of an American College, "filling" the pulpit of the college chapel on Sunday, picturing the fate of the unregenerate in fiery accents. The Yankee atmosphere had made him a bit heady. The legacy left him by his grandfather was exactly one thousand pounds--five thousand dollars. What to do with this money, he did not know! Anyway, he would take it to America and wisely invest it.

In New York he had boarded with an Irish family, the head of which was a draper. This man had a small store on West Street, and Alexander had helped tend store on Saturdays, and occasionally evenings when ships came in and sailors with money to waste lumbered and lubbered past, often with gay painted galleys in tow.

The things you do at twenty are making indelible marks on your character. Stewart had no special taste for trade, but experience spells power--potential or actual. With five thousand dollars in his belt, all in gold, he felt uncomfortable. And so on a venture he expended half of it in good Irish lace, insertions and scallop trimmings. Irish linens, Irish poplins and Irish lace were being shipped to New York--it could not be a loss! He would follow suit. If he was robbed of his money he could not at the same time be robbed of the drapery. And so he sailed away for New York--and Ireland looked more green and more beautiful as the great, uplifting, green hills faded from sight and were lost to view in the mist.

* * * * *

On the ship that carried Stewart back to New York was a young man who professed to be an adept in the draper's line. Very naturally, Stewart got acquainted with this man, and told him of his investment in drygoods. The man offered to sell the stock for Stewart.

In those days the Irish pedler with his pack full of curious and wonderful things was a common sight at the farmhouses. He rivaled both Yankee-Gentile and Jew, and his blarney was a commodity that stood him in good stead. Stewart's new-found friend promised to sell the stock in short order, by going right out among the people. He had no money of his own, and Stewart was doubly pleased to think he could set a worthy man up in business, and help himself at the same time. On reaching New York, the friend was fitted out with all the goods he could carry, and duly headed for New Jersey. In two days he came back. He had sold most of the goods all right, and with the money gotten gloriously drunk; also, he had bought drinks for all the Irishmen he could find, and naturally they were many. Stewart even then did not give up the case. He rented a small store at Two Hundred Eighty-three Broadway, and decided that by staying close to his friend he could keep him in the straight and narrow path of probity. As for himself he would teach school as usual; and he and his agent could use the back of the little store for a sleeping-room.

It was a week before his school was to begin, but in that week he became convinced that his friend was not a merchant, and to get that first month's rent he would have to run the store himself. So he put the disciple of Bacchus on the slide, and started in alone.

Stewart had a little inconvenient pride which prevented his turning pedler.

Instead of going to the world he would bring the world to him. With this end, therefore, in view, the New York "Daily Advertiser" for September Second, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five, contained this notice:

A. T. Stewart, just arrived from Belfast, offers for sale to the
Ladies of New York a choice selection of Fresh Drygoods at Two
Hundred Eighty-three Broadway.

The advertisement was a good one--the proof of which was that many puffick ladies called to see the stock and the man just arrived from Belfast. Stewart was a wise advertiser. His use of the word "ladies" showed good psychology.

The young merchant hadn't much more than taken down his shutters before a lady entered the store and acknowledged she was one. She lived in the next block, and as soon as she read the advertisement in the paper, yet damp from the press, she came right over.

Stewart spread out his wares with shaking hands--he must make a sale to his first caller or he would never have luck. The lady bought "scallops" and lace to the extent of two dollars, on Stewart's throwing her in gratis sundry yards of braid, a card of buttons and a paper of hooks and eyes. The woman paid the money, and A. T. Stewart was launched, then and there, on a career.

He was a handsome young fellow--intelligent, and never too familiar, but just familiar enough. Women liked him; he was so respectful, almost reverent, in his attitude toward them. It took a better man to be a salesman then than now. Every article was marked in cipher, with two prices. One figure represented what the thing cost and the other was the selling-price. You secured the selling-price, if you could, and if you couldn't, you took what you could get, right down to the cost figure. The motto was, never let a customer go without selling him something. The rule now is to sell people what they want, but never urge any one to buy.

Both buyer and seller then enjoyed these fencing-bouts of the bazaar. The time for simple dealing between man and man had not yet come. To haggle, banter and blarney were parts of the game, and parts which the buyer demanded as his right. He would trade only at places where he thought he was getting the start of the dealer and where his cleverness had an opportunity for exercise. The thought of getting something for nothing was in the air, and to get the better of somebody was regarded as proper and right.

Had a retail dealer then advertised One Price and no deviation to any one, the customers would surely have given him absent treatment. The verbal fencing, the forays of wit, the clash of accusation and the final forlorn sigh of surrender of the seller, were things which the buyer demanded as his, or more properly her, right.

Often these encounters attracted interested by-standers, who saw the skilful buyer berate the seller and run down his goods, until the poor man, abject and undone, gave up. To get the better of the male man and force him to his knees is the pleasant diversion of a certain type of feminine mind. Before marriage the woman always, I am told, takes this high-handed attitude. Perhaps she dimly realizes that her time for tyranny is short. To make the man a suppliant is the delight of her soul. After marriage the positions are reversed. But in the good old days, most women, not absolutely desiccated by age or ironed out by life's vicissitudes, found a sort of secondary sexual delight in these shopping assaults on the gentlemanly party on the other side of the counter.

We have all seen women enter into heated arguments, and indulge in a half-quarrel, with attractive men, about nothing. If the man is wise he allows the woman to force him into a corner, where he yields with a grace, ill-concealed, and thus is he victor, without the lady's knowing it. This is a sort of salesmanship that Sheldon knows nothing of, and that, happily, is, for the most part, not yet obsolete. A. T. Stewart was a natural salesman of the old school. He was a success from the very start. He was tall; he had good teeth, a handsome face, a graceful form and dressed with exquisite care. This personal charm of manner was his chief asset. And while business then was barter, and the methods of booth and bazaar prevailed, Stewart was wise enough never to take advantage of a customer regarding either price or quality. If the buyer held off long enough she might buy very close to cost, but if she bought quickly and at Stewart's figures, he had a way of throwing in a yard of ribbon, or elastic, or a spool or two of thread, all unasked for, that equalized the transaction. He seems to have been the very first man in trade to realize that to hold your trade you must make a friend of the customer. In a year he had outgrown the little store at Two Hundred Eighty-three Broadway, and he moved to a larger place at Two Hundred Sixty-two Broadway. Then came a new store, built for him by a worthy real-estate owner, John Jacob Astor by name. This store was thirty feet wide, one hundred feet deep, and three stories high, with a basement. It was a genuine Drygoods-Store.

It had a ladies' parlor on the second floor, and a dressing-room with full-length mirrors ordered from Paris.

They were the first full-length mirrors in America, and A. T. Stewart issued a special invitation to the ladies of New York to come and see them and see themselves as others saw them. To arrange these mirrors so that a lady could see the buttons on the back of her dress was regarded as the final achievement of legerdemain.

The A. T. Stewart store was a woman's store. In hiring salesmen the owner picked only gentlemen of presence. The "floorwalker" had his rise in A. T. Stewart. Once a woman asked a floorwalker this question, "Do you keep stationery?" and the answer was, "If I did I'd never draw my salary." This is a silly story and if it ever happened, it did not transpire at A. T. Stewart's. There the floorwalker was always as a cow that is being milked. For the first fifteen years of his career, Stewart made it a rule to meet and greet every customer, personally.

The floorwalker--or the "head usher," as he was called--was either the proprietor or his personal representative. Stewart never offered to shake hands with a customer, no matter how well he knew the lady, but bowed low, and with becoming gravity and gentle voice inquired her wishes. He then conducted her to the counter where the goods she wanted were kept. As the clerk would take down his goods Stewart had a way of reproving the man thus: "Not that, Mr. Johnson, not that--you seem to forget whom you are waiting on!" When the lady left, Stewart accompanied her to the door. He wore a long beard, shaved his upper lip, and looked like a Presbyterian clergyman making pastoral calls. Silks, dress-goods and laces gradually grew to be the A. T. Stewart specialties. That the man had taste and never ran stripes around a stout lady, or made a very slim one look more so, is a matter of history. "I have been hoping you would come, for we have a piece of silk that seems to have been made for you. I ordered it put aside until you could see it. Mr. Johnson, that silk pattern, please, that I told you not to show to any one until Mrs. Brevoort called. Thank you; yes, that is the one."

Then there were ways of saying, "Oh, Mr. Johnson, you remember the duplicate of that silk-dress pattern which was made for Queen Victoria--I think Mrs. Astor would like to examine it!" Thus was compliment fused with commerce and made to yield a dividend.

* * * * *

The prevailing methods in trade are always keyed by the public. The merchant is part of the public; he ministers to the public. A public that demands a high degree of honesty and unselfish service will get it. Sharp practise and double-dealing among the people find an outcrop in public affairs. Rogues in a community will have no trouble in finding rogue lawyers to do their bidding. In fact, rogue clients evolve rogue attorneys. Foolish patients evolve fool doctors. And superstition and silliness in the pew find a fitting expression in the pulpit.

The first man in New York to work the "Cost-Sale" scheme was A. T. Stewart. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty he advertised: "Mr. A. T. Stewart, having purchased a large amount of goods, soon to arrive, is obliged, in order to make room for these, to dispose of all the stock he has on hand, which will be sold at Actual Cost, beginning Monday at eight A. M. Ladies are requested to come early and avoid the crush."

At another time he advertised: "A. T. Stewart is obliged to raise a large amount of money to pay for silks and dress-goods that are now being made for him in Europe. To secure this money he is obliged to hold a Cost Sale of everything in his store. This sale will begin Friday at noon, and end at midnight on Saturday, the day after."

Stewart also had "Fire Sales," although it speaks well for himself that he never had a fire in his own store. If others had fires he was on hand to buy the salvage, and whether he bought it or not he managed to have a "Fire Sale." He loved the smoke of commercial rhetoric, and the excitement of seeing the crowd. This applies more particularly to the first twenty years of his career. During those first years he used to have a way of opening cases on the sidewalk and selling from the case to the first person who made an offer. This brought him good luck, especially if the person had cross-eyes or was a hunchback. The messy clutter in front of the store and the pushing crowds advertised the business. Finally, a competitor next door complained to the police about Stewart's blocking the sidewalk.

The police interfered and Stewart was given one day to clear off the walk. At once he put up a big sign: "Our neighbors to the right, not being able to compete with us, demand that we shall open no more goods on the sidewalk. To make room we are obliged to have a Cost Sale. You buy your goods, pay for them and carry them away--we can't even afford to pay for wrapping-paper and string."

All this tended to keep the town awake, and the old Irish adage of "Where McGinty sits is the head of the table," became true of A. T. Stewart. His store was the center of trade. When he moved, the trade moved with him.

To all charitable objects he gave liberally. He gave to all churches, and was recognized as a sort of clergyman himself, and in his dress he managed to look the part. The ten per cent off to clergymen and schoolteachers was his innovation. This ten per cent was supposed to be his profit, but forty per cent would have been nearer it. Of course the same discount had to be given to any member of a clergyman's or a teacher's family. And so we hear of one of Stewart's cashiers saying, "Over half of the people in New York are clergymen or teachers." The temptation to pass one's self off for a clergyman at Stewart's store was a bait that had no lure when you visited Girard College.

All this was but a part and parcel of the times--an index of the Zeitgeist.

* * * * *

A. T. Stewart was alive, alert and sensitive to the spirit of the times. He kept abreast with the best thought of the best people. The idea of opening boxes and bales on the sidewalk was abandoned early in the game; and the endeavor was to show the fabric only under the most favorable conditions. Stewart was reaching out for a higher clientele. The motto became, "Not how cheap, but how good." If A. T. Stewart sold goods at an average profit of, say, thirty per cent, he could well afford to sell a small portion of his stock at cost, or even at ten per cent below cost. He knew his stocks, and he made it a point never to carry goods over from one year to another.

Before he held one of his famous "Cost Sales," he would personally work all night, taking down from the shelves and out of drawers and showcases everything in the store. Then he himself would dictate what each article should be sold for. Here was exercise for a mind that worked by intuition. The master decided instantly on how much this thing would bring. In railroad managing there are two ways of making rates. One is the carefully figured-out cost of transportation. The other plan is to make a rate that will move the tonnage. A regular passenger rate is the rate that will afford a profit. An "excursion rate," a "homeseekers' rate," an "old-home rate," is the one that experience shows is necessary to tempt people to travel.

Drygoods deteriorate in quality when kept on the shelves for several months. Worse than that, they cease to attract the buyers. People go where there is life, activity, and are moved by that which is youthful, new and fresh. Old stocks become dead stocks, and dead stocks mean dead business and dead men, or bankruptcy. When it came to selling old stocks, Stewart paid no attention to the cost. He marked the tag in big, plain figures in red ink at the price he thought would move the goods. And usually he was right. We hear of his marking a piece of dress-goods forty-nine cents a yard. A department manager came in and in alarm explained that the goods cost fifty-three. "That has nothing to do with the case," replied Stewart; "we would not buy it today at fifty-three, and we do not want the stuff on our shelves even at forty-nine."

"But," said the manager, "this is a Cost Sale, and if we sell below cost we should explain that fact to our customers." And the answer was: "Young man, you must tell the customer only what she will believe. The actual truth is for ourselves."

Stewart worked for an average of profit and this he secured. His receipts mounted steadily year by year, until in Eighteen Hundred Fifty they were ten thousand dollars a day. And when he moved into his Business Palace at Astor Place, Tenth Street and Broadway, the sales jumped to an average of over fifty thousand dollars a day.

* * * * *

When A. T. Stewart built his Business Palace in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five, it was the noblest business structure in America. Much of the iron used in it was supplied by Peter Cooper, and that worthy man was also consulted as to the plans.

Just a square away from Stewart's Business Palace stands Cooper Union. In selecting this location A. T. Stewart was influenced largely by the fact that it was so near to that center of art and education which Peter Cooper had made worldwide in fame. Stewart said, "My store shall vie with your museum, and people will throng it as they do an exposition." And his prophecy proved true.

At his death, in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-six, Stewart was the richest man in New York, save an Astor and a Vanderbilt, and these had inherited their wealth--wealth made through the rise of real estate--while Stewart had made his money in legitimate trade.

A. T. Stewart was worth forty million dollars. This vast estate was mostly frittered away, honeycombed and moth-eaten, by hungry attorneys. The business was carried on by Hessians who worked both ends against the middle, and let the estate foot the deficits.

A. T. Stewart had a genius for trade, but he had no gift for giving. The world needs a school for millionaires, so that, since they can not take their millions with them, they can learn to leave their money wisely and well. After an up-and-down--mostly down--career of a decade, the Business Palace was bought by John Wanamaker. Again, and almost instantly, the Business Palace became a center of light and education, and the splendid aisles that a generation before had known the tread of the best people of Manhattan, again felt their step.

When Stewart built the Business Palace, people said, "Oh, it is too far uptown--nobody will go there." But they were wrong. When John Wanamaker moved in, many said, "Oh, it's beautiful--but you know, it is too far downtown--nobody will go there." And these were as wrong as the first. "Where McGinty sits is the head of the table." The trade siphoned itself thither under the magic name of Wanamaker, as though the shade of A. T. Stewart had been summoned from its confines in the Isles of Death.

In Stewart's day no sign had been placed on the building. He said, "Everybody will know it is A. T. Stewart's!" And they did. After his death the place was plastered with signs that called in throaty falsetto at the passer-by, like eager salesmen on the Midway who try to entice people to enter. The new management took all these signs down, and by the main entrance placed a modest tablet carrying this inscription:

John Wanamaker
Successor to
A. T. Stewart

It was a comment so subtle that it took New York a year to awaken to its flavor of tincture of iron.

That little sign reminds one of how Disraeli was once dining with an American and two other Englishmen. In the course of the conversation the American proudly let slip the information that he traced a pedigree to parents who came to America in the Mayflower. One of the Englishmen here coughed, and vouchsafed the fact that he traced a lineage to Oliver Cromwell. A little pause followed, and the other guest spat, muzzled his modesty and said he traced to William the Conqueror. Disraeli, with great deliberation, made a hieroglyphic on the tablecloth with his fork and said, "And I trace a pedigree to Moses, who walked and talked with God on Mount Sinai, fifteen centuries before the birth of Christ."

John Wanamaker leaped the gulf of twenty years and traced direct to A. T. Stewart, as well he might, for it was Stewart's achievement that had first fired his imagination to do and become. A. T. Stewart was the greatest merchant of his time. And John Wanamaker has been not only a great merchant, but a teacher of merchants. And the John Wanamaker Stores now form a High School of economic industrialism.

John Wanamaker is still teaching, tapping new reservoirs of power as the swift-changing seasons pass. As a preacher and a teacher he has surely surpassed the versatile Stewart.

* * * * *

To succeed in business today it is not enough that you should look out for Number One: you must also look out for Number Two. That is, you must consider the needs of the buyer and make his interests your own. To sell a person something he does not want, or to sell him something at a price above its actual value, is a calamity--for the seller. Business is built on confidence. We make our money out of our friends--our enemies will not trade with us.

In law the buyer and the seller are supposed to be people with equal opportunity to judge of an article and pass on its value. Hence there is a legal maxim, "Caveat emptor"--"Let the buyer beware"--and this provides that when an article is once purchased and passes into the possession of the buyer it is his, and he has no redress for short weight, count or inferior quality. Behind that legal Latin maxim, "Caveat emptor," the merchant stood for centuries, safely entrenched. It was about Eighteen Hundred Sixty-five that it came to John Wanamaker, a young merchant just starting business in Philadelphia, that the law is wrong in assuming that buyer and seller stand on a parity, and have an equal opportunity for judging values. The dealer is a specialist, while the buyer, being a consumer of a great number of different things, has only a general knowledge, at best. The person with only a general idea as to values, pitted against a trained specialist, is at a great disadvantage. Therefore, to be on ethical ground the seller must be the friend of the buyer--not his antagonist. For a seller to regard the buyer as his prey is worse than non-ethical--it is immoral--a violation of the Golden Rule.

These things came to the young man, John Wanamaker, with a great throb and thrill, and he at once proceeded to put his theories into execution, and on them his business was founded. The One-Price System--all goods marked in plain figures, and money back if not satisfied--these things were to revolutionize the retail trade of the world.

John Wanamaker, of all men in America, seems to know that to stand still is to retreat. For more than forty years he has led the vanguard of the business world. He has been a teacher of merchants. His insight, initiative, originality and prophetic judgment have set the retailers of the world a pace. Many have learned much from him, and all have been influenced by him. Whether they knew it or not, and whether they would acknowledge it if they did know it, matters little.

Professor Zueblin once said of William Morris: "There is not a well-furnished house in Christendom but that shows the influence of his good taste and his gracious ideas of economy, harmony and honesty in home decoration." Likewise, we can truthfully say that there is not a successful retail store in America that does not show the influence of A. T. Stewart and his legitimate successor, John Wanamaker.

H. H. ROGERS

Success is rooted in reciprocity. He who does not benefit the world
is headed for bankruptcy on the high-speed clutch.

_H. H. Rogers_

One proof that H. H. Rogers was a personage and not a person lies in the fact that he was seldom mentioned in moderate language. Lawson passed him a few choice tributes; Ida Tarbell tarred him with her literary stick; Upton Sinclair declared he was this and that; Professor Herren averred that he bore no likeness whatever to Leo Tolstoy--and he might also have added, neither did he resemble Francis of Assisi or Simeon Stylites. Those who did not like him usually pictured him by recounting what he was not. My endeavor in this sketch will be simply to tell what he was.

Henry Huddleston Rogers was a very human individual. He was born in the village of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, in the year Eighteen Hundred Forty. He died in New York City in Nineteen Hundred Nine, in his seventieth year. He was the typical American, and his career was the ideal one to which we are always pointing our growing youth. His fault, if fault it may be, was that he succeeded too well. Success is a hard thing to forgive. Personality repels as well as attracts.

The life of H. H. Rogers was the complete American romance. He lived the part--and he looked it. He did not require a make-up. The sub-cortex was not for him, and even the liars never dared to say he was a hypocrite. H. H. Rogers had personality. Men turned to gaze at him on the street; women glanced, and then hastily looked, unnecessarily hard, the other way; children stared.

The man was tall, lithe, strong, graceful, commanding. His jaw was the jaw of courage; his chin meant purpose; his nose symboled intellect, poise and power; his brow spelled brain. He was a handsome man, and he was not wholly unaware of the fact. In him was the pride of the North American Indian, and a little of the reserve of the savage. His silence was always eloquent, and in it was neither stupidity nor vacuity. With friends he was witty, affable, generous, lovable. In business negotiation he was rapid, direct, incisive; or smooth, plausible and convincing--all depending upon the man with whom he was dealing. He often did to others what they were trying to do to him, and he did it first. He had the splendid ability to say "No" when he should, a thing many good men can not do. At such times his mouth would shut like a steel trap and his blue eyes would send the thermometer below zero. No one could play horse with H. H. Rogers. He, himself, was always in the saddle.

The power of the man was more manifest with men than with women, yet he was always admired by women, but more on account of his austerity than his effort to please. He was not given to flattery; yet he was quick to commend. He had in him something of the dash that existed when knighthood was in flower. To the great of the earth, H. H. Rogers never bowed the knee. He never shunned an encounter, save with weakness, greed and stupidity. He met every difficulty, every obstacle, unafraid and unabashed. Even death to him was only a passing event--death for him had no sting, nor the grave a victory. He prepared for his passing, looking after every detail, as he had planned trips to Europe. Jauntily, jokingly, bravely, tremendously busy, keenly alive to beauty and friendship, deciding great issues offhand, facing friend or foe, the moments of relaxation chinked in with religious emotion and a glowing love for humanity--so he lived, and so he died.

An executive has been described as a man who decides quickly, and is sometimes right. H. H. Rogers was the ideal executive. He did not decide until the evidence was all in; he listened, weighed, sifted, sorted and then decided. And when his decision was made the case was closed.

Big men, who are doing big things that have never been done before, act on this basis, otherwise they would be ironed out to the average, and their dreams would evaporate like the morning mist. The one thing about the dreams of H. H. Rogers is that he made them come true.

* * * * *

"Give me neither poverty nor riches," said the philosopher. The parents of H. H. Rogers were neither rich nor poor. They had enough, but there was never a surfeit. They were of straight New England stock. Of his four great-grandfathers, three fought in the Revolutionary War.

According to Thomas Carlyle, respectable people were those who kept a gig. In some towns the credential is that the family shall employ a "hired girl." In Fairhaven the condition was that you should have a washerwoman one day in the week. The soapy wash-water was saved for scrubbing purposes--this was in Massachusetts--and if the man of the house occasionally smoked a pipe he was requested to blow the smoke on the plants in the south windows, so as to kill the vermin. Nothing was wasted.

The child born into such a family where industry and economy are prized, unless he is a mental defective and a physical cripple, will be sure to thrive.

The father had made one trip in a whaler. He was gone three years and got a one-hundred-and-forty-seventh part of the catch. The oil market was on a slump, and so the net result for the father of a millionaire-to-be was ninety-five dollars and twenty cents. This happy father was a grocer, and later a clerk to a broker in whale-oil. Pater had the New England virtues to such a degree that they kept him poor. He was cautious, plus.

To make, you have to spend; to grow a crop, you have to plant the seed. Here's where you plunge--it is a gamble, a bet on the seed versus the eternal cussedness of things. It's you against the chances of a crop. If the drought comes, or the flood, or the chinch-bug, or the brown-tailed moth, you may find yourself floundering in the mulligatawney.

Aside from that one cruise to the whaling-grounds, Rogers Pere played the game of life near home and close to shore. The easy ways of the villagers are shown by a story Mr. Rogers used to tell about a good neighbor of his--a second mate on a whaler. The bark was weighing anchor and about to sail. The worthy mate tarried at a barroom over in New Bedford. "Ain't you going home to kiss your wife good-by?" some one asked. And the answer was: "What's the use? I'm only going to be gone two years."

Half of Fairhaven was made up of fishermen, and the rest were widows and the usual village contingent. The widows were the washerwomen.

Those who had the price hired a washerwoman one day in the week. This was not so much because the mother herself could not do the work, as it was to give work to the needy and prove the Jeffersonian idea of equality. The wash-lady was always seated with the family at table, and besides her wage was presented with a pie, a pumpkin, or some outgrown garment. Thus were the Christian virtues liberated.

Where the gray mare is the better horse, her mate always lets up a bit on his whiffletree and she draws most of the load. It was so here. The mother planned for the household. She was the economist, bursar and disburser. She was a member of the Congregational Church, with a liberal bias, which believed in "endless consequences," but not in "endless punishment." Later the family evolved into Unitarians by the easy process of natural selection. The father said grace, and the mother led in family prayers. She had ideas of her own and expressed them.

The family took the Boston "Weekly Congregationalist" and the Bedford "Weekly Standard." In the household there was a bookcase of nearly a hundred volumes. It was the most complete library in town, with the exception of that of the minister.

The house where H. H. Rogers was born still stands. Its frame was made in Sixteen Hundred Ninety--mortised, tenoned and pinned. In the garret the rafters show the loving marks of the broadax--to swing which musical instrument with grace and effectiveness is now a lost art.

How short is the life of man! Here a babe was born, who lived his infancy, youth, manhood; who achieved as one in a million; who died: yet the house of his birth--old at the time--still stubbornly stands as if to make mock of our ambitions. A hundred years ago Fairhaven had a dozen men or more who, with an auger, an adz, a broadax and a drawshave, could build a boat or a house warranted to outlast the owner.

I had tea in this house where H. H. Rogers was born and where his boyhood days were spent. I fetched an armful of wood for the housewife, and would have brought a bucket of water for her from the pump, only the pump is now out of commission, having been replaced by the newfangled waterworks presented to the town by a Standard Oil magnate. Here Henry Rogers brought chips in a wheelbarrow from the shipyard on baking-days; here he hoed the garden and helped his mother fasten up the flaming, flaring hollyhocks against the house with strips of old sailcloth and tacks.

There were errands to look after, and usually a pig, and sometimes two, that accumulated adipose on purslane and lamb's-quarters, with surplus clams for dessert, also quahaugs to preserve the poetic unities. Then there came a time when the family kept a cow, which was pastured on the common, the herd being looked after by a man who had fought valiantly in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve, and who used to tell the boys about it, fighting the battles over with crutch and cane.

In the Winter the ice sometimes froze solid clean across Buzzards Bay. The active and hustling boys had skates made by the village blacksmith. Henry Rogers had two pair, and used to loan one pair out for two cents an hour. Boys who had no skates and could not beg or borrow and who had but one cent could sometimes get one skate for a while and thus glide gracefully on one foot. There was good fishing through the ice, only it was awful cold work and not much pay, for fish could hardly be given away. In the Summer there were clams to dig, blueberries to gather, and pond-lilies had a value--I guess so! Then in the early Spring folks raked up their yards and made bonfires of the Winter's debris. Henry Rogers did these odd jobs, and religiously took his money home to his mother, who placed it in the upper right-hand corner of a bureau drawer. The village school was kept by an Irishman who had attended Harvard. He believed in the classics and the efficacy of the ferrule, and doted on Latin, which he also used as a punishment. Henry Rogers was alive and alert and was diplomatic enough to manage the Milesian pedagogue without his ever knowing it. The lessons were easy to him--he absorbed in the mass. Besides that, his mother helped nights by the light of a whale-oil lamp, for her boy was going to grow up to be a schoolteacher--or possibly a minister, who knows!

Out in Illinois, when the wanderlust used to catch the evolving youth, who was neither a boy nor a man, he ran away and went Out West. In New England the same lad would have shipped before the mast, and let his parents guess where he was--their due punishment for lack of appreciation.

To grow up on the coast and hear the tales of the seafaring men who have gone down to the sea in ships, is to catch it sooner or later. At fifteen Henry Rogers caught it, and was duly recorded to go on a whaler. Luckily his mother got word of it, and canceled the deal. About then, good fortune arrived in the form of Opportunity. The young man who peddled the New Bedford "Standard" wanted to dispose of his route.

Henry bought the route and advised with his mother afterward, only to find that she had sent the seller to him. Honors were even. His business was to deliver the papers with precision. Later he took on the Boston papers, also. This is what gave rise to the story that Henry Rogers was a newsboy.

He was a newsboy, but he was a newsboy extraordinary. He took orders for advertisements for the "Standard," and was also the Fairhaven correspondent, supplying the news as to who was visiting whom; giving names of good citizens who were shingling their chicken-houses, and mentioning those enjoying poor health. Whether the news did anybody any good or not matters little--the boy was learning to write. In after-years he used to refer to this period of his life as his "newspaper career." Superstitious persons have been agitated about that word "Standard," and how it should have ominously come into the life of H. H. Rogers at this early time.

When the railroad came in, Henry got a job as assistant baggageman. The conductorship was in sight--twenty years away, but promised positively by a kind relative--when something else appeared on the horizon, and a good job was exchanged for a better one.

An enterprising Boston man had established a chain of grocery-stores along the coast, and was monopolizing the business or bidding fair to do so. By buying for many stores, he could buy cheaper than any other one man could. But the main point of the plan was the idea of going to the home, taking the order and delivering the goods. Before that, if you wanted things you went to the store, selected them and carried them home. To have asked the storekeeper to deliver the goods to your house would have given that gentleman heart-failure. He did mighty well to carry in stock the things that people needed. But here was a revolutionary method--a new deal. Henry Rogers' father said it was initiative gone mad, and would last only a few weeks. Henry Rogers' mother said otherwise, and Henry agreed with her. He had clerked in his father's grocery, and so knew something of the business. Moreover, he knew the people--he knew every family in Fairhaven by name, and almost every one for six miles around as well.

He started in at three dollars a week, taking orders and driving the delivery-wagon. In six months his pay was five dollars a week and a commission. In a year he was making twenty dollars a week. He was only eighteen--slim, tall, bronzed and strong. He could carry a hundred pounds on his shoulder. The people along the route liked him: he was cheerful and accommodating.

Not only did he deliver the things, but he put them away in cellar, barn, closet, garret or cupboard. He did not only what he was paid to do, but more. He anticipated Ali Baba, who said, "Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for anything more than they do." It was the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, and Henry Rogers was making money. He owned his route, and the manager of the stores was talking about making him assistant superintendent. Had he stuck to his job he might have become a partner in the great firm of Cobb, Bates and Yerxa, and put Bates to the bad. It would have then been Cobb, Rogers and Yerxa--and later, H. H. Rogers, Dealer in Staple and Fancy Groceries. But something happened about this time that shook New Bedford to its center, and gave Fairhaven a thrill.

Whale-oil was whale-oil then, and whale-oil and New Bedford were synonymous. Now, a man out in Pennsylvania had bored down into the ground and struck a reservoir. A sort of spouting sperm-whale! But with this important difference: whales spout sea-water, while this gusher spouted whale-oil, or something just as good.

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The year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine is an unforgetable date--a date that ushers in the Great American Renaissance, in which we now live. Three very important events occurred that year. One was the hanging of Old John Brown, who was fifty-nine years old, and thus not so very old. This event made a tremendous stir in Fairhaven, just as it did everywhere, especially in rural districts. The second great event that happened in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine was the publication of a book by a man born in Eighteen Hundred Nine, the same year that Lincoln was born. The man's name was Charles Darwin, and his book was "The Origin of Species." His volume was to do for the theological world what John Brown's raid did for American politics. The third great event that occurred in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine was when a man by the name of Edwin L. Drake, Colonel by grace, bored a well and struck "rock-oil" at Titusville, Pennsylvania.

At that time "rock-oil" or "coal-oil" was no new thing. It had been found floating on the water of streams in West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

There were rumors that some one in digging for salt had tapped a reservoir of oil that actually flowed a stream. There were oil-springs around Titusville and along Oil Creek. The oil ran down on the water and was skimmed off by men in boats. Several men were making modest fortunes by bottling the stuff and selling it as medicine. In England it was sold as "American Natural Oil," and used for a liniment. The Indians had used it, and the world has a way of looking to aborigines for medicine, even if not for health. Spiritualistic mediums and doctors bank heavily on Indians. This natural oil was known to be combustible. Out of doors it helped the campfire. But if burned indoors it made a horrible smoke and a smell to conjure with. Up to that time whale-oil mostly had been used for illuminating and lubricating purposes. But whale-oil was getting too high for plain people. It looked as if there were a "whale trust." Some one sent a bottle of this "natural" oil down to Professor Silliman of Yale to have it analyzed. Professor Silliman reported that the oil had great possibilities if refined, both as a luminant and as a lubricant.

To refine it, a good man who ran a whisky-still tried his plan of the worm that never dies, with the oil. The vapor condensed and was caught in the form of an oil that was nearly white. This oil burned with a steady flame, if protected by a lamp-chimney.

Rock-oil in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight was worth twenty dollars a barrel. Lumbermen out of a job turned skimmers, and often collected a barrel a day, becoming as it were members of the cult known as the Predatory Rich.

This is what tempted Colonel Drake to bore his well, and see if he might possibly strike the vein that was making the skimmers turn octopi. It took Drake nearly a year to drill his well. He met with various obstacles and difficulties, but on August Twenty-second, Eighteen Hundred Fifty-nine, that neck of the woods was electrified by the news that Drake's Folly was gushing rock-oil.

Soon there were various men busily boring all round the neighborhood, with the aid of spring-poles and other rude devices. Several struck it rich, but many had their labor for their pains. One man was getting sixty-five barrels a day and selling the oil for eighteen dollars a barrel.

The trouble was to transport the oil. Barrels were selling for five dollars each, and there were no tanks. This was a lumber country, with no railroads within a hundred miles. One enterprising man went down to Pittsburgh and bought a raft-load of barrels, which he towed up the Allegheny River to the mouth of Oil Creek. Then for ten dollars a day he hired farmers with teams to take the barrels to Titusville and fill them and bring them back. The oil was floated down to Pittsburgh and sold at a big profit. Stills were made to refine the oil, which was sold to the consumer at seventy-five cents a gallon. The heavy refuse-oils were thrown away.

In Eighteen Hundred Sixty began the making of lamp-chimneys, a most profitable industry. The chimneys sold for fifty cents each, and with the aid of Sir Isaac Newton's invention did not long survive life's rude vicissitudes.

Men were crowding into the oil country, lured by the tales of enormous fortunes and rich finds. No one could say what you might discover by digging down into the ground. One man claimed to have struck a vein of oyster-soup. And anyway he sold oyster-soup over his counter at a dollar a dish. Gas-gushers were lighted and burned without compunction as to waste. Gamblers were working overtime.

The first railroad into the oil country came from Pittsburgh, and was met with fight and defiance by the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Teamsters, who saw their business fading away. The farmers, too, opposed the railroad, as they figured that it meant an end to horse-flesh, except as an edible. But the opposition wore itself out, and the railroads replaced its ripped-up rails, and did business on its grass-grown right of way and streaks of rust.

The second railroad came from Cleveland, which city was a natural distributing-point to the vast consuming territory lying along the Great Lakes.

John D. Rockefeller, a clerk in a Cleveland commission-house, became interested in the oil business in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two. He was then twenty-three years old, and had five hundred dollars in the bank saved from his wages. He put this money into a refining-still at Titusville, with several partners, all workingmen. John peddled the product and became expert on "pure white" and "straw color." He also saw that a part of the so-called refuse could be re-treated and made into a product that was valuable for lubricating purposes.

Other men about the same time made a like discovery. It was soon found that refined oil could not be shipped with profit; the barrels often had to be left in the sunshine or exposed to the weather, and transportation facilities were very uncertain. The still was then torn out and removed to Cleveland.

The oil business was a most hazardous one. Crude oil had dropped from twenty dollars a barrel to fifty cents a barrel. No one knew the value of oil, for no one knew the extent of the supply. An empty barrel was worth two dollars, and the crude oil to fill it could be bought for less than half that.

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At twenty-one, two voices were calling to Henry Rogers: love of country and business ambition. The war was coming and New England patriotism burned deep in the Rogers heart. But this young man knew that he had a genius for trade. He was a salesman--that is to say, he was a diplomat and an adept in the management of people. Where and how could he use his talent best?

When Sumter was fired upon, it meant that no ship flying the Stars and Stripes was safe. The grim aspect of war came home to New Bedford with a reeling shock, when news arrived that a whaler, homeward bound, had been captured, towed into Charleston Harbor, and the ship and cargo confiscated. It was a blow of surprise to the captain and sailors on this ship, too, for they had been out three years and knew nothing of what was going on at home. Then certain Southern privateers got lists of the New England whale-ships that were out, and lay in wait for them as whalers lie in wait for the leviathan.

Prices of whale-oil soared like balloons. New England ships at home tied up close or else were pressed into government service. The high price of oil fanned the flame of speculation in Pennsylvania.

Henry H. Rogers was twenty-one. It was a pivotal point in his life. He was in love with the daughter of the captain of a whaler. They were neighbors and had been schoolmates together. Henry talked it over with Abbie Gifford--it was war or the oil-fields of Pennsylvania! And love had its way, just as it usually has. The ayes had it, and with nearly a thousand dollars of hard-earned savings he went to the oil-fields. At that time most of the crude oil was shipped to tidewater and there refined. In the refining process, only twenty-five per cent of the product was saved, seventy-five per cent being thrown away as worthless. It struck young Rogers that the refining should be done at the wells, and the freight on that seventy-five per cent saved. To that end he entered into a partnership with Charles Ellis, and erected a refinery between Titusville and Oil City.

Rogers learned by doing. He was a practical refiner, and soon became a scientific one. The first year he and Ellis divided thirty thousand dollars between them.