her was
seriously ill he came to Philadelphia at once and divided the next two
months between our old home and Marion.

On December 14, 1904, my father died, and it was the first tragedy that
had come into Richard's life, as it was in that of my sister or myself.
As an editorial writer, most of my father's work had been anonymous,
but his influence had been as far-reaching as it had been ever for all
that was just and fine. All of his life he had worked unremittingly
for good causes and, in spite of the heavy burdens which of his own
will he had taken upon his none too strong shoulders, I have never met
with a nature so calm , so simple, so sympathetic with those who were
weak--weak in body or soul. As all newspaper men must, he had been
brought in constant contact with the worst elements of machine
politics, as indeed he had with the lowest strata of the life common to
any great city. But in his own life he was as unsophisticated; his
ideals of high living, his belief in the possibilities of good in all
men and in all women, remained as unruffled as if he had never left his
father's farm where he had spent his childhood. When my father died
Richard lost his "kindest and severest critic" as he also lost one of
his very closest friends and companions.

During the short illness that preceded my brother's death, although
quite unconscious that the end was so near, his thoughts constantly
turned back to the days of his home in Philadelphia, and he got out the
letters which as a boy and as a young man he had written to his family.
After reading a number of them he said: "I know now why we were such a
happy It was because we were always, all of us, of the same age."

CHAPTER XV

MOUNT KISCO

During my brother's life there were four centres from which he set
forth on his travels and to which he returned to finish the articles
for which he had collected the material, or perhaps to write a novel, a
few short stories, or occasionally a play, but unlike most of the
followers of his craft, never to rest. Indeed during the last
twenty-five years of his life I do not recall two consecutive days when
Richard did not devote a number of hours to literary work. The centres
of which I speak were first Philadelphia, then New York, then Marion,
and lastly Mount Kisco. Happy as Richard had been at Marion, the
quaint little village, especially in winter, was rather inaccessible,
and he realized that to be in touch with the