hey did in later years. And indeed there was small
reason why these should not have been happy years for any young man.
At twenty-six Richard had already accomplished much, and his name had
become a familiar one not only to New Yorkers but throughout the
country. Youth and health he had, and many friends, and a talent that
promised to carry him far in the profession he loved. His new position
paid him a salary considerably larger than he had received heretofore,
and he now demanded and received much higher terms for his stories.
All of which was well for Richard because as his income grew so grew
his tastes. I have known few men who cared less for money than did my
brother, and I have known few who cared more for what it could buy for
his friends and for himself. Money to him, and, during his life he
made very large sums of it, he always chose to regard as income but
never capital. A bond or a share of stock meant to him what it would
bring that day on the Stock Exchange. The rainy day which is the
bugaboo for the most of us, never seemed to show on his horizon. For a
man whose livelihood depended on the lasting quality of his creative
faculties he had an infinite faith in the future, and indeed his own
experience seemed to show that he was justified in this belief. It
could not have been very long after his start as a fiction writer that
he received as high a price for his work as any of his contemporaries;
and just previous to his death, more than twenty years later, he signed
a contract to write six stories at a figure which, so far as I know,
was the highest ever offered an American author. In any case, money or
the lack of it certainly never caused Richard any worriment during the
early days of which I write. For what he made he worked extremely
hard, but the reputation and the spending of the money that this same
hard work brought him caused him infinite happiness. He enjoyed the
reputation he had won and the friends that such a reputation helped him
to make; he enjoyed entertaining and being entertained, and he enjoyed
pretty much all of the good things of life. And all of this he enjoyed
with the naive, almost boyish enthusiasm that only one could to whom it
had all been made possible at twenty-six. Of these happy days Booth
Tarkington wrote at the time of my brother's death:

"To the college boy of the early nineties Richard Harding Davis was the
'beau ideal of jeunesse doree,' a sophisticated hear