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 world in which we played.
Whatever the mental stimulus my brother derived from his home in Philadelphia,the foundation of the physical strength that stood him in such good stead in the campaigns of his later years he derived from those early days at Point Pleasant.The cottage we lived in was an old two-story frame building,to which my father had added two small sleeping-rooms.Outside there was a vine-covered porch and within a great stone fireplace flanked by cupboards,from which during those happy days I know Richard and I,openly and covertly,must have extracted ton-->>