voice—these were eloquent of strength, determination, and concentration.
There was a black pearl in his cravat and an almost priceless canary-colored diamond sparkling on his little finger. He wore gray, striped trousers and a black coat and vest, across which was a beaded gold watch-chain. Everywhere in his room were flowers, roses, lilies, and bunches of the famous Lawson Pink, the flower for which he once paid $30,000.
The man whom I had expected to find haggard, pale, wild-eyed, and excited, in the centre of a nervous hurricane, was rosy-cheeked, cheerful, and apparently as free from care as though he had never heard of Wall Street. He spoke rapidly but in an even voice, occasionally pacing the floor and sometimes gesturing or setting his hands firmly on his hips. He answered questions promptly and with an almost boyish appearance of frankness. It would be hard to imagine a more masculine, compact, and concentrated personality.
This is the man who left school in Cambridge at the age of twelve, walked into Boston with his books under his arm, and secured a three-dollar-a-week position as an office-boy almost on the very spot where, after thirty-six years, he has worked himself up into a position from which he feels able to captain the fight against Standard Oil and its allies. He owns a palace in Boston filled with works of art; he has a six-hundred acre farm on Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences, three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred and fifty dogs, and a building for training his animals larger than Madison Square Garden. Some of his horses are worth many thousands of dollars apiece. Even the experts of the German Government who examined Dreamwold the other day were amazed at its costliness and perfection. Within forty-eight hours Mr. Lawson wrote and published a large illustrated book analyzing his farm and gave it to his German visitors