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.

If it should appear to my friends and readers, that I found only the “sunny side” of life, and they should wonder why I so seldom saw the shadow, or received the thrust of unkindness, I can simply say that I was almost universally so well received, that the few cases of unkind treatment became the exception and not the rule, and these were generally so bitterly repented, and so amply amended, that I felt it would be an act of ingratitude to note them in my experiences.