Henry H.Rogers(Florence, April, 1904)

Mr. Rogers has been visiting the witness stand periodically in Boston for more than a year now. For eleven years he has been my closest and most valuable friend. His wisdom and steadfastness¹ saved my copyrights from being swallowed up in the wreck² and ruin of Charles L. Webster & Co., and his commercial wisdom has protected my pocket ever since in those lucid³ intervals⁴ wherein I have been willing to listen to his counsels and abide⁵ by his advice--a thing which I do half the time and half the time I don't.
He is four years my junior; he is young in spirit, and in looks, complexion⁶, and bearing, easy and graceful⁷ in his movements, kind-hearted, attractive, winning, a natural gentleman, the best-bred gentleman I have met on either side of the ocean in any rank of life from the Kaiser of Germany down to the bootblack. He is affectionate, endowed with a fine quality of humor, and with his intimates he is a charming comrade. I am his principal intimate and that is my idea of him. His mind is a bewildering spectacle to me when I see it dealing⁸ with vast business complexities⁹ like the affairs of the prodigious¹⁰ Standard Oil Trust, the United States Steel, and the rest of the huge financial combinations of our time---for he and his millions are in them all, and his brain is a very large part of the machinery¹¹ which keeps them alive and going. Many a time in the past eleven years my small and troublesome affairs have forced me to spend days and weeks of waiting time down in the city of New York, and my waiting refuge has been his private office in the Standard Oil Building, stretched out on a sofa behind his chair, observing his processes, smoking, reading, listening to his reasonings with the captains of industry, and

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