The business prospered, the shop grew. Little do I remember of all this, or the increased comforts of life or moving into the new home on the hillside above the town by this time known as Rouseville. But the change in the outlook on the world about me, I do remember. We had lived on the edge of an active oil farm and oil town. No industry of man in its early days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days. But we left the center of this disorder, went to the hillside, looked down on it; and as for me I no longer saw it, for opposite us was a hillside so steep it had never been drilled. It was clothed with the always changing beauty of trees and shrubs, the white shadflowers and the red maples, the long garlands of laurel and azalea in the spring, the green of every shade through the summer, the crimson and gold, russets and tans of the fall, the frost- and snow-draped trees of the winter. I did not see the derricks for the trees. The hillside above our house and the paths which led around it became a playground in which I reveled. I was not the only one about to forget the ugliness of the Valley and remember through life the beauty of those hillsides. Years later I was to know fairly well one of the great figures in the development of oil, Henry H. Rogers, then the active head of the Standard Oil Company. We discovered in talking over the early days of the industry that at the very moment I was beginning to run the hills above Rouseville he was running a small refinery on the Creek and living on a hillside just below ours, separated only by a narrow ravine along each side of which ran a path. “Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I used to carry our washing every Monday morning, go for it every Saturday night. Probably I’ve seen you hunting flowers on your side of the ravine. How beautiful it was! I was never happier.” That reminiscence of Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.