Rockefeller and Rogers.
"My mother," says John D. Rockefeller, "taught me to make everything count. When I became partner in a grocery, I got some barrels of beans—cheap, because there were many black ones among them. I expected to sell them cheap, too. But my mother said:
"'John, put in all your spare time, night and day, sorting those beans, and then they will be all extra quality and you can sell them at an extra price.'
"For weeks I worked, picking over those beans, by hand, throwing out all the black ones. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. Through me, my mother says to all young men:
"'Throw the worthless out of your life; make everything count.'"
Henry H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, said recently:
"Up to a very few years ago I went to my mother with all my joys and all my woes, just as I did when a boy."
Once a week, in Fairhaven, the model Massachusetts town for which Mr. Rogers has done so much, he drives to the grave of that mother whom he loved.
In his mother's cottage while she lived (she would never consent to move into the great new castle her son built) Mr. Rogers put a long-distance telephone. Then, every morning in his New York office, at eleven o'clock precisely, in the very midst of the battle for millions, he would call a truce for a few minutes "to telephone my mother."