ed cotton-wood, wound
along by Denver, and two miles up its course I saw a great sandstorm,
which in a few minutes covered the city, blotting it out with a dense
brown cloud. Then with gusts of wind the snowstorm began, and I had to
trust entirely to Birdie's sagacity for finding Evans's shanty. She
had been there once before only, but carried me direct to it over rough
ground and trenches. Gleefully Mrs. Evans and the children ran out to
welcome the pet pony, and I was received most hospitably, and made warm
and comfortable, though the house consists only of a kitchen and two
bed closets. My budget of news from "the park" had to be brought out
constantly, and I wondered how much I had to tell. It was past eleven
when we breakfasted the next morning. It was cloudless with an intense
frost, and six inches of snow on the ground, and everybody thought it
too cold to get up and light the fire. I had intended to leave Birdie
at Denver, but Governor Hunt and Mr. Byers of the Rocky Mountain News
both advised me to travel on horseback rather than by train and stage
telling me that I should be quite safe, and Governor Hunt drew out a
route for me and gave me a circular letter to the settlers along it.

Denver is no longer the Denver of Hepworth Dixon. A shooting affray in
the street is as rare as in Liverpool, and one no longer sees men
dangling to the lamp-posts when one looks out in the morning! It is a
busy place, the entrepot and distributing point for an immense
district, with good shops, some factories, fair hotels, and the usual
deformities and refinements of civilization. Peltry shops abound, and
sportsman, hunter, miner, teamster, emigrant, can be completely rigged
out at fifty different stores. At Denver, people who come from the
East to try the "camp cure" now so fashionable, get their outfit of
wagon, driver, horses, tent, bedding, and stove, and start for the
mountains. Asthmatic people are there in such numbers as to warrant
the holding of an "asthmatic convention" of patients cured and
benefited. Numbers of invalids who cannot bear the rough life of the
mountains fill its hotels and boarding-houses, and others who have been
partially restored by a summer of camping out, go into the city in the
winter to complete the cure. It stands at a height of 5,000 feet, on
an enormous plain, and has a most glorious view of the Rocky Range. I
should hate even to spend a week there. The sight of those glories so