practice. It is not inspiration--it never was that--without
practice, with any writer from Shakespeare down.

me. I don't say, like Papa, stop writing. God
forbid. I would almost as soon say stop breathing,
for it is pretty much the same thing. But only to remember
that you have not yet conquered your art. You are a
journeyman not a master workman, so if you don't succeed, it
does not count. The future is what I look to, for you. I had
to stop my work to say all this, so good-bye dear old chum.

Yours,

MOTHER.


If anything worried Richard at all at this period, I think it
was his desire to get down to steady newspaper work, or indeed
any kind of work that would act as the first step of his
career and by which he could pay his own way in the world. It
was with this idea uppermost in his mind in the late spring of
1886, and without any particular regret for the ending of his
college career, that he left Baltimore and, returning to his
home in Philadelphia, determined to accept the first position
that presented itself. But instead of going to work at once,
he once more changed his plans and decided to sail for
Santiago de Cuba with his friend William W. Thurston, who as
president of the Bethlehem Steel Company, was deeply
interested in the iron mines of that region. Here and then it
was that Richard first fell in love with Cuba--a love which in