CREEDE, March 7.
A young man in a sweater and top boots met me at the
depot and said that I was Mr. Davis and that he was a young
man whose life I had written in "There was 90 and 9." He was
from Buffalo and was editing a paper in Creede. He said I was
to stop with him — Creede is built of new pine boards and lies
between two immense mountains covered with pines and snow.
The town is built in the gulley and when the spring freshets
come will be a second Johnstown. Faber, the young man, took
me to the Grub State Cabin where I found two most amusing
dudes and thoroughbred sports from Boston, Harvard men living
in a cabin ten by eight with four bunks and a stove, two
banjos and H O P E. They own numerous silver mines, lots, and
shares, but I do not believe they have five dollars in cash
amongst them. They have a large picture of myself for one of
the ornaments and are great good fellows. We sat up in
our
bunks until two this morning talking and are planning to go to
Africa and Mexico and Asia Minor together. — Lots of love.
DICK.
Very happy indeed to be back in his beloved town, Richard
returned to New York late in March, 1892, and resumed his
editorial duties. But on this occasion his stay was of
particularly short duration, and in May, he started for his
long-wished-for visit to London. The season there was not yet
in full swing, and after spending a few days in town,
journeyed to Oxford, where he settled down to amuse himself
and collect material for his first articles on English life as
he found it. In writing of this visit to Oxford, H. J.
Whigham, one of Richard's oldest friends, and who afterward
served with him in several campaigns, said:
"When we first met Richard Harding Davis he was living,
to all practical purposes, the life of an undergraduate at
Balliol College, Oxford. Anyone at all conversant with the
customs of universities, especially with the idiosyncrasies of
Oxford, knows that for a person who is not an undergraduate to
share the life of undergraduates on equal terms, to take part
in their adventures, to be admitted to their confidence is
more difficult than it is for the camel to pass through the
eye of a needle or for the rich man to enter heaven. It was
characteristic of Davis that although he was a few years older
than the average university "man" and came from a strange
country and, moreover, had no official reason for being at
Oxford at all, he was accepted as one of themselves by the
Balliol undergraduates, in fact, lived in Balliol for at least
a college term, and happening to fall in with a somewhat
enterprising generation of Balliol men he took the lead in
several escapades which have been written into Oxford history.
There is in the makeup of the best type of college
undergraduate a wonderful spirit of adventure, an unprejudiced
view of life, an almost Quixotic feeling for romance, a
disdain of sordid or materialistic motives, which together
make the years spent at a great university the most golden of
the average man's career. These characteristics Davis was
fortunate enough to retain through all the years of his life.
The same spirit that took him out with a band of Oxford youths
to break down an iron barrier set by an insolent landowner
across the navigable waters of Shakespeare's Avon carried him,
in after years, to the battlefields where Greece fought
against the yoke of Turkey, to the insurrecto camps of Cuba,
to the dark horrors of the Congo, to Manchuria, where gallant
Japan beat back the overwhelming power of Russia, to Belgium,
where he saw the legions of Germany trampling over the
prostrate bodies of a small people. Romance was never dead
while Davis was alive."
That Richard lost no time in making friends at Oxford as,
indeed, he never failed to do wherever he went, the following
letters to his mother would seem to show:
