Mark Twain Speaking

193. Henry H. Rogers Dinner

640 MARK TWAIN SPEAKING· 193 · Businessmen of Norfolk, Virginia, honored Henry H. Rogers at a dinner celebrating the completion ofthe 442-mile Virginian Railway, a road Rogers controlled andfor which he hadprovided most ofthe $40,000,000 it had cost to build. The chairman introduced Mark Twain as "one who has made millions laugh-not the loud laughter that bespeaks the vacant mind, but the laugh of mirth, intelligent mirth, the mirth that helps the human heart and the human mind." Dinner Speech Businessmen's Dinnerfor Henry H. Rogers, Monticello Hotel, Norfolk, Virginia, April 3, 1909 I thank you, Mr. Toastmaster, for the compliment which you have paid me, and I am sure I would rather have made people laugh than cry, yet in my time I have made some of them cry; and before I stop entirely I hope to make some more of them cry. I like compliments. I deal in them myself. I have listened with the greatest pleasure to the compliments which the chairman has paid to Mr. Rogers and that road of his tonight, and I hope some of them are deserved. It is no small distinction to a man like that to sit here before an intelligent crowd like this and to be classed with Napoleon and Caesar. Why didn't he say that this was the proudest day of his life? Napoleon and Caesar are dead, and they can't be here to defend themselves. But I'm here! The chairman said, and very truly, that the most lasting thing in the hands of man are the roads which Caesar built, and it is true that he built a lot of them; and they are there yet. Yes, Caesar built a lot of roads in England, and you can find them. But Rogers has only built one road, and he hasn't finished that yet. I like to hear myoid friend complimented, but I don't like to hear it overdone. I didn't go around today with the others to see what he is doing. I will do that in a quiet time, when there is not anything going on, and when I shall not be called upon to deliver intemperate compliments on a MARK TWAIN SPEAKING 641 railroad in which I own no stock. They proposed that I go along with the committee and help inspect that dump down yonder. I didn't go. I saw that dump. I saw that thing when I was coming in on the steamer, and I didn't go because I was diffident, sentimentally diffident, about going and looking at that thing again-that great, long, bony thing; it looked just like Mr. Rogers's foot. The chairman says Mr. Rogers is full of practical wisdom, and he is. It is intimated here that he is a very ingenious man, and he is a very competent financier. Maybe he is now, but it was not always so. I know lots of private things in his life which people don't know, and I know how he started, and it was not a very good start. I could have done better myself. The first time he crossed the Atlantic he had just made the first little strike in oil, and he was so young he did not like to ask questions. He did not like to appear ignorant. To this day he don't like to appear ignorant, but he can look as ignorant as anybody. On board the ship they were betting on the run of the ship, and they proposed that this youth from the oil regions should bet on the run of the ship. He did not like to ask what a half crown was, and he didn't know; but rather than be ashamed of himself he did bet half a crown on the run of the ship, and in bed he could not sleep. He wondered if he could afford that outlay in case he lost. He kept wondering over it, and said to himself, "A king's crown must be worth $20,000, so half a crown would cost $10,000." He could not afford to bet away $10,000 on the run of the ship, so he went up to the stakeholder and gave him $150 to let him off. I like to hear Mr. Rogers complimented. I am not stingy in compliments to him myself. Why, I did it today when I sent his wife a telegram to...