But Mr. Rogers had other troubles. He and his friends had been engaged in organizing the gas interests of the East. They had engineered stock raids which had been as disastrous to Wall Street as to gambling Main Street. Such operations in the past had never cost him more than a passing angry comment by the public press. Now, however, came something damaging to his reputation and his pride. It was a series of lurid articles by a bold and very-much-on-the-inside broker and speculator—Thomas Lawson of Boston. For nearly two years Lawson published monthly in _Everybody’s Magazine_ under the admirable title “Frenzied Finance” circumstantial accounts of the speculation of the Rogers group and what they had cost their dupes. That story cut Mr. Rogers’ pride to the quick. He is said to have threatened the American News Company with destruction if it circulated the magazine. Taken all together the excitement and anger were too much for even his iron frame and indomitable spirit, and in the summer of 1907 he suffered a stroke which put him out of the fight for many weeks. When he came back it was at once to collide with the Government suit against the Standard Oil Company, and soon after that with the “rich man’s panic” of 1907, a panic for which his old enemy in copper, F. Augustus Heinze, was largely responsible. Early in November, when the panic was still raiding the banks and the millionaires of the country, I stood one day at a corner on Fifth Avenue waiting for the traffic to clear. Suddenly I saw an arm waving to me from a slowly passing open automobile, and there was H. H. Rogers smiling at me in the friendliest way. When I reported the encounter at the office Mr. Phillips at once said: “Why not try to see him? If he’ll talk about what is going on, what a story he could tell!” But would he see me? I was a little dubious about trying. Still the greeting and the smile seemed to mean that at least he harbored no ill will. Suppose, I said, he is sufficiently subdued to go over with me his exciting life. What a document of big business in the eighties and nineties he could produce if he would put down his recollections with the frankness with which he had sometimes talked to me! It seemed worth trying for, and I asked for an appointment. I had not made a mistake. Mr. Rogers was harboring no ill will. I was promptly invited to come to his house. He greeted me heartily. I found him physically changed, stouter, less sinewy, but quite as frank as ever. He told me of his stroke; he spoke bitterly of what he called the Roosevelt panic as well as of Roosevelt’s interference with the business of the Standard Oil Company. He gave me my cue when he began to talk about the early days of the Oil Region. “There is a whole chapter,” he said, “that has not been written, that from ’59 to ’72.”