AT THE PHYSICO-TECHNICAL INSTITUTE 415 



Now we have a long, long railway journey in slow trains 

 with no good cars, which certainly shows one the country 

 and the people, but one travels in dirt and discomfort with 

 impossible passengers. Considering that every one travels in 

 the same class, most of them behave admirably; they cannot 

 help being unsympathetic, and having a hideous lingo and 

 way of gesticulating. That they let their children swarm upon 

 their fellow-travellers, and never check them, is less attractive, 

 considering the great desire for amusement and the shrill voices 

 of these darlings; but one hears and sees more of human 

 interest than in the Palace Car, and taking them as a whole the 

 long journeys are less fatiguing than with us. ... 



4 From Manitou we went, partly by road, to a health resort, 

 Colorado Springs, which as a matter of fact possesses no 

 springs, but has a good hotel, and thence for twelve hours' 

 railway journey through a dry land in which it never rains, 

 although there are pastures, to this place in the mountains, 

 our westernmost point. The railway is the Rio-Grande-Denver, 

 constructed by an English engineer, Palmer, who has built an 

 English cottage for himself and his family in a remote valley, 

 where he has coaxed green stretches of lawn, and flower beds, 

 bushes and creepers out of the wilderness, which without 

 destroying the characteristics of the landscape has none the 

 less created a bit of Old England that excited our admiration 

 and delight. He built no Cyclopean erections in the kitchen 

 garden, no Norman castles with a little front garden to the 

 street, but he sunk an Artesian well, watered his land, and now 

 has turf, and the whole dark blue world of mountains above 

 him, with the prairie sufficiently accentuated to afford a view. . . . 



1 Hentschel is shortly going to leave us, as he wishes to travel 

 farther West, and with Knapp we shall only go as far as 

 St. Louis. From there we are to go on alone to Niagara and 

 Boston, and thence back to New York. There we shall put 

 up at the Waldorf Hotel, Fifth Avenue; then a few days at the 

 Villards', a visit to Mr. Phelps, in order to see the cities of 

 Washington, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, with their Institutes 

 and Universities, and then the homeward journey, at the idea of 

 which I partly tremble, partly rejoice at getting away from 

 this country. Out here in the West one turns into a fanatical 

 European. . . . Your father is well, somewhat thinner, but 



