nd incidentally
the stronger of the two, it can readily be imagined that the fight
always ended in my complete undoing. Strangulation was the method
usually employed to finish me, and, whatever else Richard was at that
tender age, I can testify to his extraordinary ability as a choker.

But these early days in the city were not at all the happiest days of
that period in Richard's life. He took but little interest even in the
social or the athletic side of his school life, and his failures in his
studies troubled him sorely, only I fear, however, because it troubled
his mother and father. The great day of the year to us was the day our
schools closed and we started for our summer vacation. When Richard
was less than a year old my mother and father, who at the time was
convalescing from a long illness, had left Philadelphia on a search for
a complete rest in the country. Their travels, which it seems were
undertaken in the spirit of a voyage of discovery and adventure,
finally led them to the old Curtis House at Point Pleasant on the New
Jersey coast. But the Point Pleasant of that time had very little in
common with the present well-known summer resort. In those days the
place was reached after a long journey by rail followed by a three
hours' drive in a rickety stagecoach over deep sandy roads, albeit the
roads did lead through silent, sweet-smelling pine forests. Point
Pleasant itself 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