inkling of Spanish, likewise beguile you off into space, and leave
the once nebulous burg beaming in the rear.

Denver's theatre is remarkably handsome. In hot weather the atmosphere
is tempered by torrents of ice-water that crash through hidden aqueducts
with a sound as of twenty sawmills. The management _dams_ the flood when
the curtain rises and the players begin to speak; the music lovers
_damn_ it from the moment the curtain falls. They are absorbed in
volumes of silent profanity between the acts; for the orchestra is
literally drowned in the roar of the rushing element. There was nothing
that interested me more than a copy of Alice Polk Hill's "Tales of the
Colorado Pioneers"; and to her I return thanks for all that I borrowed
without leave from that diverting volume.

Somehow Denver, after my early visit, leaves with me an impression as of
a perfectly new city that has just been unpacked; as if the various
parts of it had been set up in a great hurry, and the citizens were now
impatiently awaiting the arrival of the rest of the properties. Some of
the streets that appeared so well at first glance, seemed, upon
inspection, more like theatrical flats than realities; and there was
always a consciousness of everything being wide open and uncovered.
Indeed, so strongly did I feel this that it was with difficulty I could
refrain from wearing my hat in the house. Nor could I persuade myself
that it was quite safe to go out alone after dark, lest unwittingly I
should get lost, and lift up in vain the voice of one crying in the
wilderness; for the blank and weird spaces about there are as wide as
the horizon where the distant mountains seem to have slid partly down
the terrestrial incline,--spaces that offer the unwary neither hope nor
hospice,--where there is positively shelter for neither man nor beast,
from the red-brick heart of the ambitious young city to her snow-capped
ultimate suburb.

CHAPTER III.

The Garden of the Gods.

The trains run out of Denver like quick-silver,--this is the prettiest
thing I can say of Denver. They trickle down into high, green valleys,
under the shadow of snow-capped cliffs. There the grass is of the
liveliest tint--a kind of salad-green. The air is sweet and fine;
everything looks clean, well kept, well swept--perhaps the wind is the
keeper and the sweeper. All along the way there is a very striking
contrast of color in rock, meadows, and sky; the whole is as appetizing
t