. But you must not
expect to do it this week or next. A lasting, real success takes time,
and patient, steady work. Read Boz's first sketches of "London Life"
and compare them with "Sydney Carton" or "David Copperfield" and you
will see what time and hard work will do to develop genius.

I suppose you will wonder why I am moved to say all this? It is, I
think, because of your saying "the article sent to St. Nicholas was
the best you would be able to do for years to come" and I saw you were
going to make it a crucial test of your ability. That is, forgive me,
nothing but nonsense. Whatever the article may be, you may write one
infinitely superior to it next week or month. Just in proportion as
you feel more deeply, or notice more keenly, and as you acquire the
faculty of expressing your feelings or observations more delicately and
powerfully which faculty must come into 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 later years became almost an obsession with him. Throughout his
life whenever it was possible, and sometimes when it seemed practically
impossible, my brother would listen to the call of h