THE PREVIOUS HOTEL.
DOWN at Nathrop, Colorado, there is a large, new, and fine hotel, where no guest ever ate or slept. It stands there near the South Park track like the ghost of some nice, clean country inn. The reader will naturally ask if the house is haunted, that no one stops at the very attractive hotel in a country where good hotels are rare. No, it is not that. It in not haunted so much as it would like to be. Though it is a fine hotel, there is no town nearer it than Buena Vista, and no one is going to do business at Buena Yista and go up to Nathrop on a hand-car for his meals.
It is a case where a smart aleck of a man built a hotel, and asked his fellow citizens to come and form a town around him and make him rich. Mr. Nathrop was rather an impulsive man, and one day he said something that reflected on another impulsive man, and when people came and looked for Nathrop, they found that his body was tangled up in the sage brush, and his soul was marching on.
The hotel was just completed, and the ladders, and the handsome lime barrels, and hods, and old nail kegs, and fragments of laths, and pieces of bricks, and scaffolds, and all those things that go to make life desirable, are still there adorning the hotel and the front yard; but there is no handsome man with a waxed mustache inside at the desk, shaking his head sadly when he is asked for a room, and looking at you with that high-born pity and contempt for your pleading, that the hotel clerk—heir apparent to the universe—always keeps for those who go to him with humility.
There is no Senegambian, with a whisk broom, waiting to brush your clothes off your back, and leave you arrayed in a birth-mark and the earache, at twenty-five cents per brush. There is no young, fair masher, strutting up and down the piazza, trying to look brainy and capable of a thought. It is only a hollow mockery, for the chamber-maid with the large slop-pail does not come at daylight to pound on your door, and try to get in and fix up your room, and wake you up, and frighten you to death with her shocking chaos of wart-environed and freckle-frescoed beauty.
There the new hotel will, no doubt, stand for ages, while a little way off, in his quiet grave, the proprietor, laid to rest in an old linen handkerchief, is sleeping away the years till he shall be awakened by the last grand reveille. There's no use talking, it's tough.