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 at Point Pleasant I fear I can remember but a few of our
elders. There were George Lambdin, Margaret Ruff, and Milne
Ramsay, all painters of some note; a strange couple, Colonel
Olcott and the afterward famous Madam Blavatsky, trying to
start a Buddhist cult in this country; Mrs. Frances Hodgson
Burnett, with her foot on the first rung of the ladder of
fame, who at the time loved much millinery finery. One day my
father took her out sailing and, much to the lady's