Ladies are so vigorous in that country that they think nothing of a walk of many miles, but the intensely rarefied air of the mountains made my own respiration very difficult.
We returned to Denver, where our few days' visit was all too short, for it was with painful reluctance we yielded to the demands of business interest, and left a city which to us was fraught with so much pleasure, and went to Colorado Springs, a place of five thousand inhabitants, and one of the most stirring towns in the State. It is very level, being symmetrically laid out in broad and shaded streets, and derives its name from the fact of being the station from which tourists take the stage for the springs at Manitou, six miles distant. It is also the point from which pleasure parties daily leave for Pike's Peak.
One of the main features of interest in our visit to Colorado Springs, was the presence of the great "Man of the Period," over whom the stupendous heart of Barnum throbbed with exultant pride, and scientists waxed wondering and eloquent. This august personage, who was no other than the since sensational "Stone Man of Colorado," was lying in state, in all the majesty of his marbleized grandeur, and was the magnet toward which throngs of wonder-seekers were irresistibly drawn, all of whom, as if entering the presence chamber of the King of Terrors, seemed awed by this silent "representative of the dead past," and with hushed voices and bated breath, lingered over the lineaments of one, which, if it had been known at that time was not a real petrifaction, would perhaps have excited only feelings of ridicule and words of derision. We were willing to be humbugged with the rest for the sacred emotions experienced under the silent potency of this phenomenon of the nineteenth century; nor can we even in the light of subsequent revelations deny the fact that he was "fearfully and wonderfully made."
We next visited Pueblo, where this giant was exhumed, but were not at all pleased with the town or its surroundings, and suffered greatly from thirst rather than drink the offensive water for which the residents are so heavily taxed. It was so apparently poisonous in odor, that if it had been in the malarious climate of Chicago, instead of the exhilarating atmosphere of Colorado, all would have died from its effects.
We have never visited a State which held such diversified interest as that of Colorado, a fitting resort for the invalid, the pleasure seeker, artist, scientist or poet. No place but some haunt of the Muses could boast the ethereal beauty of a "Glen Eyrie," and no wonder the "Garden of the Gods" is supposed to have once been the abode of "Great Jove himself," and that there fair Venus bathed her beauteous form, and girdled with the fabled "Cestus," held her court amid the immortal beauties of the sacred spot.
We came through Kansas via the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, meeting with no better success than that which marked our former trip in that region of country, and could only conclude, that while their crops were at that time large and lucrative, the grasshopper raid had taught them a lesson of economy which they were rigidly observing.
Before returning home we visited the only surviving sister of my mother, who lived in Salsbury, Missouri, and who not having heard from me since the Chicago fire, concluded that I might have perished in its flames. She and her husband were both over seventy years old, and strange to say, were like so many of the old people I have met in my travels, that my readers might suppose my heroes and heroines had found the "fabled fountain" and secured immortal youth. Be this as it may, it could certainly be said of her husband, as of the father of Evangeline:
"Stalwart and stately of form
Was the man of seventy summers;
Hearty and hale was he
As an oak that is covered with snow-flakes."
I had a delightful visit of two days with this aged couple, during which my aunt rehearsed to me many incidents in the early life of my mother, and presented me with a lock of her hair, which, as a memento, is ever magnetically associated with the "loved ones gone before."
Returning to Chicago, I found my husband, whose health was far worse than when I saw him in Galveston. This, together with a combination of surrounding circumstances, suggested the project of writing up "The World as I have found it," and I spent the greater part of the winter of 1877-8 in this work.