Part 24 (1/2)

July 31st, 1904

DEAR MOTHER:

We have been met here with a bitter disappointh only 18 hours away We can hear the guns at Port Arthur the fall of which they pro out in one of the Russian barracks To-o, partly by horse and partly by train A week et near headquarters And then we have no guarantee that ill see any fighting Thisand the worst of the many we have suffered in the last fourher to seriously think of going home but I am afraid she will not Were it not for that and the disappoint a week's journey away frouns I would be content My horse is well and so agage and skirood sfor the of six miles to Kin Chow and then 30 miles by rail ”Headquarters” is about a five days ride distant Tell Chas s I forgot in Boston at Kin Chow Fox and I will get out just as soon as we see fighting but before you get this you will probably hear by cable froht The onlyho for this and worst of all

to you all

dick

MANCHURIA, August 14, 1904

We have been riding through Manchuria for eleven days Nine days we rode then two days we rested By losing the trail we e about 20 miles a day I kept well and enjoyed it very much

As I had to leave my servant behind with a sick horse, I had to take care of my mule and pony myself and hunt fodder for them, so I was pretty busy Saiki did all he could, but he is not a servant and sooner than ask hih a very beautiful country, sleeping at railway stations and sao battle fields of recent fights Noe are in a Chinese City and waiting to see what should be the biggest fight since Sedan The Russians are about ten ates of the city without a guide Of course, we have none of that freedom we have enjoyed in other wars, but apart from that they treat us very well indeed And in a day or two they pro, which ill be allowed to witness from a hill This is a very queer old city but the towns and country are all very primitive and we depend upon ourselves for our entertainment I expect soon to see you at home In three more days I shall have been out here fiveGood luck to you all

R H D

MANCHURIA, August 18th, 1904

We still are inside this old Chinese town It has rained for five days, and this one is the first in which we could go abroad Unless you swim very well it is not safe to cross one of these streets We have found an old temple and some of us are in it now It is such a relief to escape from that compound and the rain This place is full of weeds and pine trees, cooing doves and butterflies The teed Chinaman We did not come here to sit in temples, so John and I will leave in a week, battle or no battle The arguht as ait a little longer does not touch us It was that argu deceived weekly, and the sae here It is i he tells his subordinates to tell us, so, ill be on our way back when you get this I am well, and only disappointed

Had they not broken faith with us about Port Arthur ould by now have seen fighting As it is ill have wasted six months

Love to Dad, and Chas and Nora and you

dick

In writing of his decision to leave the japanese army, Richard, after his return to the United States, said:

”On the receipt of Oku's answer to the Correspondents we left the army

Other correspondents would have quit then, as most of them did ten days later, but that their work and Kuroki, so far fro fifty miles north toward Mukden, as Okabe said he enty -in in Three days after we had left the ared for six days

”So, our half-year of ti, of daily humiliations at the hands of officers with minds diseased by suspicion, all of which would have been reat spectacle, was to the end absolutely lost to us Perhaps we ment As the cards fell we certainly did

”The only proposition before us was this: There was s ould not see it

Confronted with the saain, I would decide in exactly the same manner Our misfortune lay in the fact that our experience with other arentlemen speak the truth, that her titles of General and Major-General, do not lie In that ere mistaken”

Greatly disappointed at his failure to see really anything of the war, much embittered at the japanese over their treatment of the correspondents, Richard reached Vancouver in October As my father was seriously ill he came to Philadelphia at once and divided the next two months between our old home and Marion

On Deceedy 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 anony as it had been ever for all that was just and fine All of his life he had worked unreood causes and, in spite of the heavy burdens which of his oill he had taken upon his none too strong shoulders, I have never met with a nature so calm , so simple, so sympathetic with those eak--weak in body or soul As all newspaper ht in constant contact with the worst elements of machine politics, as indeed he had with the lowest strata of the life coreat 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 co the short illness that preceded h quite unconscious that the end was so near, his thoughts constantly turned back to the days of his hoot out the letters which as a boy and as a younga number of them he said: ”I knohy ere such a happy It was because ere always, all of us, of the sa 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 numerous affairs in which he was interested that his headquarters should be in or near New York