discomfiture and greatly to Richard's and my delight, upset
the famous authoress. At a later period the Joseph Jeffersons
used to visit us; Horace Howard Furness, one of my father's
oldest friends, built a summer home very near us on the river,
and Mrs. John Drew and her daughter Georgie Barrymore spent
their summers in a near-by hostelry. I can remember Mrs.
Barrymore at that time very well---wonderfully handsome and a
marvellously cheery manner. Richard and I both loved her
greatly, even though it were in secret. Her daughter Ethel I
remember best as she appeared on the beach, a sweet,
long-legged child in a scarlet bathing-suit running toward the
breakers and then dashing madly back to her mother's open
arms. A pretty figure of a child, but much too young for
Richard to notice at that time. In after-years the child in
the scarlet bathing-suit and he became great pals. Indeed,
during the latter half of his life, through the good days and
the bad, there were very few friends who held so close a place in
his sympathy and his affections as Ethel Barrymore.

Until the summer of 1880 my brother continued on at the
Episcopal Academy. For some reason I was sent to a different
school, but outside of our supposed hours of learning we were
never apart. With less than two years' difference in our ages
our interests were much the same, and I fear our interests of
those days were largely limited to out-of-door sports and the
theatre. We must have been very young indeed when my father
first led us by the hand to see our first play. On Saturday
afternoons Richard and I, unattended but not wholly unalarmed,
would set forth from our home on this thrilling weekly
adventure. Having joined our father at his office, he would