“It is good of you to come, Mr. Paret,” he said simply, as though his summons had not been a command.  “Perhaps you know some of these gentlemen.”

One of them was our United States Senator, Theodore Watling.  He, as it turned out, had been summoned from Washington.  Of course I saw him frequently, having from time to time to go to Washington on various errands connected with legislation.  Though spruce and debonnair as ever, in the black morning coat he invariably wore, he appeared older than he had on the day when I had entered his office.  He greeted me warmly, as always.

“Hugh, I’m glad to see you here,” he said, with a slight emphasis on the last word.  My legal career was reaching its logical climax, the climax he had foreseen.  And he added, to the banker, that he had brought me up.

“Then he was trained in a good school,” remarked that personage, affably.

Mr. Barbour, the president of our Railroad, was present, and nodded to me kindly; also a president of a smaller road.  In addition, there were two New York attorneys of great prominence, whom I had met.  The banker’s own special lieutenant of the law, Mr. Clement T. Grolier, for whom I looked, was absent; but it was forthwith explained that he was offering, that morning, a resolution of some importance in the Convention of his Church, but that he would be present after lunch.

“I have asked you to come here, Mr. Paret,” said the banker, “not only because I know something personally of your legal ability, but because I have been told by Mr. Scherer and Mr. Barbour that you happen to have considerable knowledge of the situation we are discussing, as well as some experience with cases involving that statute somewhat hazy to lay minds, the Sherman anti-trust law.”

A smile went around the table.  Mr. Watling winked at me; I nodded, but said nothing.  The banker was not a man to listen to superfluous words.  The keynote of his character was despatch....

The subject of the conference, like many questions bitterly debated and fought over in their time, has in the year I write these words come to be of merely academic interest.  Indeed, the very situation we discussed that day has been cited in some of our modern text-books as a classic consequence of that archaic school of economics to which the name of Manchester is attached.  Some half dozen or so of the railroads running through the anthracite coal region had pooled their interests,—­an extremely profitable proceeding.  The public paid.  We deemed it quite logical that the public should pay—­having been created largely for that purpose; and very naturally we resented the fact that the meddling Person who had got into the White House without asking anybody’s leave,—­who apparently did not believe in the infallibility of our legal Bible, the Constitution,—­should maintain that the anthracite roads had formed a combination in restraint of trade, should lay down the preposterous doctrine—­so subversive of the Rights of Man—­that railroads should not own coal mines.  Congress had passed a law to meet this contention, suit had been brought, and in the lower court the government had won.