te-Streeter doesn't understand the
ninety-nine Lawson ideas and impulses which do not come to
him, he charges them up to "eccentricity" and
"charlatanism."

Boston says Lawson is vain. He certainly does hold a good
opinion of himself, and he has a right to. A boy who goes
into a bank at twelve as he did and before he is seventeen
cleans up $60,000 is hardly to be rebuked for considering
that he is better fitted for the financial game than most.
He knows life, he knows men. He has made and lost fortunes
and is not afraid of being "broke."

That experience has been his repeatedly, but always he rose
again. His brains, energy, and daring would cause him to
rise anywhere. Had he been given birth in a South American
republic, the dictatorship would have been his inevitably.

Lawson was born a money-maker, but he is a great deal more
than that. He is a many-sided man, interested ardently in
lots of things to which the ordinary money-maker is
oblivious. He is very, very human. He has a soul.

Although he is raining blows on important men, who are not
accustomed to being treated with disrespect--although he is
charging them with crimes, and hopes, I should say, to drive
them out of the country or into the penitentiary, he speaks
of some of them with the greatest kindness, thoroughly
understanding their good personal qualities.

THE WONDERFUL ROGERS

He denounces H. H. Rogers, for example, as a robber, a
criminal, and he said to me:

"Rogers is a marvellously able man and one of the best
fellows living. If you knew him only on the social side, and
knew him for years, you couldn't help loving him. He is
considerate, kindly, generous, helpful, and everything a man
should be to his friends. But when it comes to business--his
kind of business--when he turns away from his better self
and goes aboard his pirate brig and hoists the _Jolly
Rover_, God help you! And, then, as a buccaneer you have to
admire him, for he is a master among pirates, and you have
to salute him, even when he has the point of his cutlass at
the small of your back and you're walking the plank at his
order. Rogers is wonderful. He is one of the most prolific
human creatures I have ever met; prolific in thought, in
devices--and I've been at the game a l