At the beautiful town of Boulder we stopped at the prominent and luxurious hotel known as the American House, and after a short stay took the stage for Caribon, then the most elevated town in the State, standing considerably over nine thousand feet above the sea-level.  A romantic and ever-ascending ride of a day’s length was required to reach this eyrie, and at noon-day the driver allowed us to stop for our dinner, when our wayside inn was improvized from the sheltering shade of grand old trees, our table a rock, our chairs the same.

No ambrosia could have been sweeter to the gods than was our sylvan feast, with the appetite induced by mountain air and exercise; no nectar finer than the crystal draught, dipped from the little stream; no orchestra more musical than its varied tones.  Although it was yet September, there was a severe snow-storm, and, the next day, when it had subsided, a party went out to pick raspberries, which were sweet and delicious in flavor, while beside the deep snow-banks bloomed flowers as beautiful as the rarest exotics.

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.”