"I'll tell you," he said. "At first it was all right. I had certain things I wanted to say to people, and I said them. But as I went on, I began to feel my audiences more and more. I began to know how certain things I said would affect them. I began to want to affect them—to play upon them, see them stirred, hear them applaud. So, hardly realizing it at first, I began shifting my speeches, playing up certain points, not so much because those points were the ones which ought to be played up, but because of the pleasure it gave me to work up my listeners. Then, one night while I was talking, I realized what was happening to me. I was losing my intellectual honesty. Public speaking had been stealing it from me without my knowing it. Then and there I made up my mind to give it up. I'm not going to Say it any more; I'm going to Write it. When a man is writing, other minds are not acting upon his, as they are when he is speaking to an audience."
Personally, I think Judge Lindsey would be stronger with the more critical minds of Colorado if he, too, had felt this way.
A number of odd items about Denver should be mentioned.
Elitch's Garden, the city's great summer amusement place, is famous all through the country. It was originally a farm, and still has a fine orchard, besides its orderly Coney Island features. Children go there in the afternoons with their nurses, and all of Denver goes there in the evenings when the great attraction is the theater with its stock company which is of a very high order.
The Tabor Opera House in Denver is famous among theatrical people largely because of the man who built it. Tabor was one of Denver's most extraordinary mining millionaires. After he had struck it rich he determined to build as a monument to himself, the finest Opera House in the United States, and "damn the expense."
While the building was under construction he was called away from the city. The story is related that on his return he went to see what progress had been made, and found mural painters at work, over the proscenium arch. They were painting the portrait of a man.
"Who's that?" demanded Tabor.
"Shakespeare," the decorator informed him.
"Shakespeare—shake hell!" responded the proprietor. "He never done nothing for Denver. Paint him out and put me up there."
Though there have been no Tabors made in Denver in the last few years, mining has not gone out of fashion. In the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel my companion and I saw several old fellows, sitting about, looking neither prosperous nor busy, but always talking mines. A kind word, or even a pleasant glance is enough to set them off. Instantly their hands dive into their pockets and out come nuggets and samples of ore, which they polish upon their coat sleeves, and hold up proudly, turning them to catch the light.