l calamities, to such, at least, this latter want is not
much felt! Civilization, society, has many charms, but their absence
is not an unmixed evil. The freedom entailed thereby, the
non-existence of social restrictions, are at least advantages
ensured.

I _had_ intended to make my home with my sons on the ranch. The
roughness of the life in no way disgusted me, for I am accustomed to
such, having experienced it in many countries, and in various
occupations. But the want of intellectual pursuits, the absence of
society, the lack of woman's influence, and the many charms connected
therewith, wearied me sadly. In two words I found I was too old for
the life, and that I could not, at my age, adapt myself to such great
and violent changes. I was happy while there, but I felt it would not
do as a continuance, and thus determined, having started my sons and
provided for them, to return to Europe.

"Colorado Springs," the great health resort of Western America, is
some twenty-five miles only from the Water Ranch. It is, in many
respects, an unique Sanitarium, and should therefore be better known
than it is to Europeans. Its climatic and soil advantages (the latter
no mean factor), as a cure-place for consumption, asthma, bronchitis,
and all pulmonary diseases, are perhaps exceptional, for I doubt if
any spot on the earth's surface, owing to weather, temperature,
elevation, locality, and soil, possesses so dry an air.[8] When we
consider how many thousands of young lives, often the flowers of the
household flock, here in England alone, succumb to these maladies,
how neither age nor sex is spared, it is surely well that such an
exceptional cure-place as Colorado Springs existing should be made
known far and wide.

_I_ should be quite incompetent myself, from lack of medical
knowledge, to dilate on this point satisfactorily, were it not that
during a visit of a week to the place, I made the acquaintance of an
English physician there of high repute, Doctor S. Edwin Solly, who
went there years ago to seek relief himself from some pulmonary
complaint (I forget what), found it, and eventually settled there. He
gave me a book descriptive of Colorado Springs and Manitou (the
latter is the spot, five miles distant, where the medical springs
are), which is in two parts. The first is a prize essay by a Mrs.
Dunbar, a resident at Colorado Springs, and deals with the climatic,
social, and scenic conditions of the Sanitarium as set out