The last time I saw H. H. Rogers was in his office at Twenty-six Broadway. Out through a half-doorway, leading into a private conference-room, I saw a man stretched out on a sofa asleep. A great shock of white hair spread out over the pillow that held his head; and Huck Finn snores of peace, in rhythmic measures, filled the room.
Mr. Rogers noticed my glance in the direction of the Morpheus music. He smiled and said, "It's only Mark—he's taking a little well-earned rest—he was born tired, you know."
If Mark Twain were not a rich man himself, rich in mines of truth, fields of uncut fun, and argosies sailing great spiritual seas, coming into port laden with commonsense, he would long since have turned on his benefactor and nailed his hide on the barn-door of obliquity. As it is, Mark takes his own, just as Socrates did from Mr. and Mrs. Pericles. Aye, or as did Bronson Alcott, who once ran his wheelbarrow into the well-kept garden of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Orphic One was loading up with potatoes, peas, beans and one big yellow pumpkin, when he glanced around and saw the man who wrote "Self-Reliance" gazing at him seriously and steadily over the garden-wall. The father of the author of "Little Women" winced, but bracing up, gave back stare for stare, and in a voice flavored with resentment and defiance said, "I need them!"
And the owner of the garden grew abashed before that virtuous gaze, murmured apologies, and retreated in good order.
And Mark Twain used to explain it thus: "You see, it is like this: Rogers furnishes the plans and I foot the bills." And this was all there was about it. Only a big man can take his own without abasement.
Mark Twain has made two grins grow where there was only a growl before. I don't care where he gets his vegetables—nor where he takes a well-earned nap—and neither does he.
The average millionaire believes in education, because he has heard the commodity highly recommended in the newspapers. Usually, he is a man who has not had college advantages, and so he is filled with the fallacy that he has dropped something out of his life. We idealize the things that are not ours. H. H. Rogers was an exception—he was at home in any company. He took little on faith. He analyzed things for himself. And his opinion was that the old-line colleges tended to destroy individuality and smother initiative. He believed that the High School was the key to the situation, and to carry the youth beyond this was to run the risk of working his ruin. "The boy who leaves the High School at seventeen, and enters actual business, stands a much better chance of success than does the youth who comes out of college at twenty-one, with the world yet before him," he said.
He himself was one of the first class that graduated from the old Fairhaven Grammar School. He realized that his success in life came largely from the mental ammunition that he had gotten there, and from the fact that he made a quick use of his knowledge. Yet he realized that the old Fairhaven High or Grammar School was not a model institution. "It has a maximum of discipline and a minimum of inspiration," he used to say. The changing order of education found a quick response in his heart. He never brooded over his lack of advantages. On the other hand, he used often to refer to the fact that his childhood was ideal. But all around he saw children whose surroundings were not ideal, and these he longed to benefit and bless.
And so in Eighteen Hundred Eighty, when he was forty years of age, he built a Grammar Manual-Training School and presented it to the town. It was called the Rogers School. Such a gift to a town is enough to work the local immortality of the giver. But the end was not yet. In a few years, Rogers—or Mrs. Rogers, to be exact—presented to the village a Town Hall, beautiful and complete, at a cost of something over two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Next came the Millicent Public Library, in memory of a beloved daughter.