Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis | Page 4

of which he happened to be a member his
aggressiveness and his imagination usually made him the leader. As far
back as I can remember, Richard was always starting
something--usually a new club or a violent reform movement. And in
school or college, as in all the other walks of life, the reformer must, of
necessity, lead a somewhat tempestuous, if happy, existence. The
following letter, written to his father when Richard was a student at
Swarthmore, and about fifteen, will give an idea of his conception of
the ethics in the case:
SWARTHMORE--1880. DEAR PAPA:
I am quite on the Potomac. I with all the boys at our table were called

up, there is seven of us, before Prex. for stealing sugar-bowls and
things off the table. All the youths said, "O President, I didn't do it."
When it came my turn I merely smiled gravely, and he passed on to the
last. Then he said, "The only boy that doesn't deny it is Davis. Davis,
you are excused. I wish to talk to the rest of them." That all goes to
show he can be a gentleman if he would only try. I am a natural born
philosopher so I thought this idea is too idiotic for me to converse
about so I recommend silence and I also argued that to deny you must
necessarily be accused and to be accused of stealing would of course
cause me to bid Prex. good-by, so the only way was, taking these two
considerations with each other, to deny nothing but let the
good-natured old duffer see how silly it was by retaining a placid
silence and so crushing his base but thoughtless behavior and
machinations.
DICK.
In the early days at home--that is, when the sun shone--we played
cricket and baseball and football in our very spacious back yard, and
the programme of our sports was always subject to Richard's change
without notice. When it rained we adjourned to the third-story front,
where we played melodrama of simple plot but many thrills, and it was
always Richard who wrote the plays, produced them, and played the
principal part. As I recall these dramas of my early youth, the action
was almost endless and, although the company comprised two
charming misses (at least I know that they eventually grew into two
very lovely women), there was no time wasted over anything so
sentimental or futile as love-scenes. But whatever else the play
contained in the way of great scenes, there was always a mountain
pass--the mountains being composed of a chair and two tables--and
Richard was forever leading his little band over the pass while the band,
wholly indifferent as to whether the road led to honor, glory, or total
annihilation, meekly followed its leader. For some reason, probably on
account of my early admiration for Richard and being only too willing
to obey his command, I was invariably cast for the villain in these early
dramas, and the end of the play always ended in a hand-to-hand conflict
between the hero and myself. As Richard, naturally, was the hero and

incidentally the stronger of the two, it can readily be imagined that the
fight always ended in my complete undoing. Strangulation was the
method usually employed to finish me, and, whatever else Richard was
at that tender age, I can testify to his extraordinary ability as a choker.
But these early days in the city were not at all the happiest days of that
period in Richard's life. He took but little interest even in the social or
the athletic side of his school life, and his failures in his studies
troubled him sorely, only I fear, however, because it troubled his
mother and father. The great day of the year to us was the day our
schools closed and we started for our summer vacation. When Richard
was less than a year old my mother and father, who at the time was
convalescing from a long illness, had left Philadelphia on a search for a
complete rest in the country. Their travels, which it seems were
undertaken in the spirit of a voyage of discovery and adventure, finally
led them to the old Curtis House at Point Pleasant on the New Jersey
coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very little in common
with the present well-known summer resort. In those days the place
was reached after a long journey by rail followed by a three hours'
drive in a rickety stagecoach over deep sandy roads, albeit the roads did
lead through silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point Pleasant itself
was then a collection of half a dozen big farms which stretched from
the Manasquan River to the ocean half a mile distant. Nothing could
have been more primitive or