348 Beyond the Sierras. 



lower level. The result is that the luiiga are automatically expanded. It is 

 simply a matter of compulsory pulmonary exercise, neither more nor les-s. 

 The air piussages and lunj,' structure 7/ijw/ open here and now, or the pos- 

 sessor of them must perish on the spot. 



As a result, all animals begin to get a larger chest capacity. Take a 

 horse, well grown, from St. Louis to Denver, and in six months his girth will 

 have expanded five or six inches. It is this natural and inevitable enlarge- 

 ment of the chest and its consequent freedom of action that bring back 

 your asthmatic and your consumptive from the shoals of suflboation. Added 

 to this mechnnical and necessary exercise of the breathing organs, the pa- 

 tient has also the advantiige,if he is at all able to bear it, of the high electrical 

 tension of the atmosphere. I believe that Denver is more surcharged with 

 electricity than any other city in the world. You are so full of this " mode 

 of action ' that you know not what to do with yourself. If from the barber's 

 chair jou glance into the glass, you see that, under the manipulations of the 

 artist's hands, your hair is sUinding up like quills upon the fretful porcu- 

 pine. Timid people are constantly jumping and stiirting under the freaks 

 of the electrical current. On a favorable day you can walk up to the gas 

 jet, and set it oMwith your linger. Shake hands and you will feel the shock 

 to your elbow. Touch anything, and you snap and sparkle. For the first 

 day or two these sensations make you uneasy. Especially, if you try public 

 speech, do you experience inconvenience. Your chest seems to be puH'ed 

 up, and the supply of air on the vocal chords is beyond your management 

 and control. 



Denver is a good place to complete your collection of oddities. Here 

 you may still obtain a respectable buffalo hide, dressed or in the raw. In 

 another year, I presume, the traffic in the woolly covering of Sir Bison will 

 have ended forever. You can also buy (but will have to pay a round price 

 for it) the great coat of Brer Grizzly Bear, or Brer Coyote, or Brer Red Fox 

 of the mountain. I observe that the shopkeepers are by no means back- 

 ward in their tariff rates; and you are forced to stop short by the specter of 

 bankruptcy. 



Denver is also the place to collect minerals. My special friend at the 

 Whittier school gave me a box full— most beautiful and rare, and correctly 

 labeled. Yon great battlement of mountains to the west is full of all man- 

 ner of treasures. As a general fact, it appears to me that the supply of 

 precious metals and rare stones and minerals piled and scattered in the 

 gorges and clilfs of the Great West is absolutely inexhaustible. 



Before leaving the city I was taken for a drive by my friends, Judge 

 Liddell and Dr. Bancroft, out to the (me stock ranch of the latter, near the 

 foot of the mountjiins. Here I inspected the best horses and cattle which I 

 had seen since leaving the green pastures of the Wabash valley. The Doctor 

 is proud of his herd and his st^ibles; and I blame him not for his frank ad- 

 miration of the well-developed and well-kept animals about his ranch. 



I mention this visit in part because of the splendid sunset which marked 



