Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis | Page 5

as I remember it in its pastoral loveliness
much more beautiful. Just beyond our cottage the river ran its silent,
lazy course to the sea. With the exception of several farmhouses, its
banks were then unsullied by human habitation of any sort, and on
either side beyond the low green banks lay fields of wheat and corn,
and dense groves of pine and oak and chestnut trees. Between us and
the ocean were more waving fields of corn, broken by little clumps of
trees, and beyond these damp Nile-green pasture meadows, and then
salty marshes that led to the glistening, white sand-dunes, and the great
silver semi- circle of foaming breakers, and the broad, blue sea. On all
the land that lay between us and the ocean, where the town of Point
Pleasant now stands, I think there were but four farmhouses, and these
in no way interfered with the landscape or the life of the primitive
world in which we played.

Whatever the mental stimulus my brother derived from his home in
Philadelphia, the foundation of the physical strength that stood him in
such good stead in the campaigns of his later years he derived from
those early days at Point Pleasant. The cottage we lived in was an old
two-story frame building, to which my father had added two small
sleeping-rooms. Outside there was a vine-covered porch and within a
great stone fireplace flanked by cupboards, from which during those
happy days I know Richard and I, openly and covertly, must have
extracted tons of hardtack and cake. The little house was called
"Vagabond's Rest," and a haven of rest and peace and content it
certainly proved for many years to the Davis family. From here it was
that my father started forth in the early mornings on his all-day fishing
excursions, while my mother sat on the sunlit porch and wrote novels
and mended the badly rent garments of her very active sons. After a
seven-o'clock breakfast at the Curtis House our energies never ceased
until night closed in on us and from sheer exhaustion we dropped
unconscious into our patch-quilted cots. All day long we swam or
rowed, or sailed, or played ball, or camped out, or ate enormous
meals--anything so long as our activities were ceaseless and our
breathing apparatus given no rest. About a mile up the river there was
an island--it's a very small, prettily wooded, sandy-beached little place,
but it seemed big enough in those days. Robert Louis Stevenson made
it famous by rechristening it Treasure Island, and writing the new name
and his own on a bulkhead that had been built to shore up one of its fast
disappearing sandy banks. But that is very modern history and to us it
has always been "The Island." In our day, long before Stevenson had
ever heard of the Manasquan, Richard and I had discovered this tight
little piece of land, found great treasures there, and, hand in hand, had
slept in a six-by-six tent while the lions and tigers growled at us from
the surrounding forests.
As I recall these days of my boyhood I find the recollections of our life
at Point Pleasant much more distinct than those we spent in
Philadelphia. For Richard these days were especially welcome. They
meant a respite from the studies which were a constant menace to
himself and his parents; and the freedom of the open country, the ocean,
the many sports on land and on the river gave his body the constant

exercise his constitution seemed to demand, and a broad field for an
imagination which was even then very keen, certainly keen enough to
make the rest of us his followers.
In an extremely sympathetic appreciation which Irvin S. Cobb wrote
about my brother at the time of his death, he says that he doubts if there
is such a thing as a born author. Personally it so happened that I never
grew up with any one, except my brother, who ever became an author,
certainly an author of fiction, and so I cannot speak on the subject with
authority. But in the case of Richard, if he was not born an author,
certainly no other career was ever considered. So far as I know he
never even wanted to go to sea or to be a bareback rider in a circus. A
boy, if he loves his father, usually wants to follow in his professional
footsteps, and in the case of Richard, he had the double inspiration of
following both in the footsteps of his father and in those of his mother.
For years before Richard's birth his father had been a newspaper editor
and a well-known writer of stories and his mother a novelist and
short-story writer of great distinction. Of those times