Quotes by Richard Davis

• Portugal is a high hill with a white watch tower on it flying signal flags. It is apparently inhabited by one man who lives in a long row of yellow houses with red roofs, and populated by sheep who do grand acts of balancing on the side of the hill.
• It has pleased and interested me to see how I could get along under difficult circumstances and with so much discomfort but as I say I was not sent out here to improve my temper or my health or to make me more content with my good things in the East.
• Morocco as it is is a very fine place spoiled by civilization.
• Of course, the idea of a six months' holiday is enough to make anyone laugh at anything, but I find that besides that I was a good deal harassed and run down, and I am glad to cut off from everything and start fresh. I feel miserably selfish about it all the time.
• The more I thought of the McClure offer the less I thought of it. So I told him last night I was satisfied where I was, and that the $75 he offered me was no inducement.
• Wednesday a junior came to me, and told me I was to be hazed as I left the Opera House Friday night.
• To-night I am going to take a party to the headquarters of the fire department, where I have a cinch on the captain, a very nice fellow, who is unusually grateful for something I wrote about him and his men. They are going to do the Still Alarm act for me.
• I wish I was not such a very bad hand at languages. That is one thing I cannot do, that and ride.
• Anything as good and true as that moral cannot be new at this late date.
• You see, I'd not a very good place here; the fellows looked on me as a sort of special object of ridicule, on account of the hat and cane, walk, and so on, though I thought I'd got over that by this time.
• All the fascination of King Solomon's Mines seems to be behind those great mountains and this I may add is a bit of advance work for mother, an entering wedge to my disappearing from sight for years and years in the Congo.
• As soon as I landed at Malta I found that though I could go to Tunis I could not go away without being quarantined for ten days and if I remained in Malta I must stay a week.
• As soon as she gets her divorce one of us is going to marry her. We don't know which. She is about as beautiful a woman as I ever saw, and very witty and well-informed, but it would cost a good deal to keep her in diamonds.
• Creede is built of new pine boards and lies between two immense mountains covered with pines and snow.
• I am now in Gibraltar. It is a large place and there does not seem to be room in this letter, in which to express my feelings about Moors in bare legs and six thousand Red-coats and to hear Englishmen speak again.
• I knew more about Texas than the Texans and when they told me I would find summer here I smiled knowingly.
• I went out to the Derby on Wednesday and think it is the most interesting thing I ever saw over here.
• All through the night, like the tumult of a river when it races between the cliffs of a canyon, in my sleep I could hear the steady roar of the passing army.
• The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.