It was one of Aiken's very best winters, and the earliest
spring I ever lived anywhere. R. H. D. came shortly after
Christmas. The spireas were in bloom, and the monthly roses;
you could always find a sweet violet or two somewhere in the
yard; here and there splotches of deep pink against gray
cabin walls proved that precocious peach-trees were in bloom.
It never rained. At night it was cold enough for fires. In
the middle of the day it was hot. The wind never blew, and
every morning we had a four for tennis and every afternoon we
rode in the woods. And every night we sat in front of the
fire (that didn't smoke because of pretending) and talked
until the next morning.

He was one of those rarely gifted men who find their chiefest
pleasure not in looking backward or forward, but in what is
going on at the moment. Weeks did not have to pass before it
was forced upon his knowledge that Tuesday, the fourteenth
(let us say), had been a good Tuesday. He knew it the moment
he waked at 7 A. M. and perceived the Tuesday sunshine making
patterns of bright light upon the floor. The sunshine
rejoiced him and the knowledge that even before breakfast
there was vouchsafed to him a whole hour of life. That day
began with attentions to his physical well-being. There were
exercises conducted with great vigor and rejoicing, followed
by a tub, artesian cold, and a loud and joyous singing of
ballads.

At fifty R. H. D. might have posed to some Praxiteles and,
copied in marble, gone down the ages as "statue of a young