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 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