because there were many black ones among them. I expected to
sell them cheap, too. But my mother said:

"'John, put in all your spare time, night and day, sorting those beans,
and then they will be all extra quality and you can sell them at an extra
price.'

"For weeks I worked, picking over those beans, by hand, throwing out all
the black ones. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. Through me, my
mother says to all young men:

"'Throw the worthless out of your life; make everything count.'"

Henry H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, said recently:

"Up to a very few years ago I went to my mother with all my joys and all
my woes, just as I did when a boy."

Once a week, in Fairhaven, the model Massachusetts town for which Mr.
Rogers has done so much, he drives to the grave of that mother whom he
loved.

In his mother's cottage while she lived (she would never consent to move
into the great new castle her son built) Mr. Rogers put a long-distance
telephone. Then, every morning in his New York office, at eleven o'clock
precisely, in the very midst of the battle for millions, he would call a
truce for a few minutes "to telephone my mother."

Stephen V. White.

Stephen V. White, "Deacon White," one of the most trusted men in Wall
Street, has a long strip of canvas hanging on his office-wall on which are
painted, in large letters, these lines:

I shall pass through this world but once;
Any good thing which in passing I can do,
Or any kindness I can show to any human being,
Let me do it now;
Let me not defer it,
Nor neglect it,
For I shall not pass this way again.

"That's my philosophy of life," says Mr. White, "as my mother taught it to
me. Every young man should copy those lines and put the copy in the finest
frame he can afford. For those lines I owe my mother much; it was she who
made me repeat them over and over."

Edwin Markham, "The Man with the Hoe," says:

"It was the influence of my mother--my father having died--that dominated
me. She was an extraordinary woman. She kept a general store in Oregon
City, and conducted the business with remarkable energy. She was known as
the 'Woman Poet of Oregon.'

"It was from her that I got my poetical bent. Her poems were full of
feeling and of the earnestness of a strong religious spirit. They were
published only in newspapers--and to-day my scrap book containing poems
written by my mother is my most precious possession."