The foreman who was showing me shovel'd it carelessly up
with a little wooden shovel, as one might toss beans. Then large
silver bricks, worth $2000 a brick, dozens of piles, twenty in a pile.
In one place in the mountains, at a mining camp, I had a few days
before seen rough bullion on the ground in the open air, like the
confectioner's pyramids at some swell dinner in New York. (Such a
sweet morsel to roll over with a poor author's pen and ink--and
appropriate to slip in here--that the silver product of Colorado and
Utah, with the gold product of California, New Mexico, Nevada and
Dakota, foots up an addition to the world's coin of considerably over
a hundred millions every year.)
A city, this Denver, well-laid out--Laramie street, and 15th and 16th
and Champa streets, with others, particularly fine--some with tall
storehouses of stone or iron, and windows of plate-glass--all the
streets with little canals of mountain water running along the
sides--plenty of people, "business," modernness--yet not without a
certain racy wild smack, all its own. A place of fast horses, (many
mares with their colts,) and I saw lots of big greyhounds for antelope
hunting. Now and then groups of miners, some just come in, some
starting out, very picturesque.
One of the papers here interview'd me, and reported me as saying
off-hand: "I have lived in or visited all the great cities on the
Atlantic third of the republic--Boston, Brooklyn with its hills, New
Orleans, Baltimore, stately Washington, broad Philadelphia, teeming
Cincinnati and Chicago, and for thirty years in that wonder, wash'd
by hurried and glittering tides, my own New York, not only the New
World's but the world's city--but, newcomer to Denver as I am, and
threading its streets, breathing its air, warm'd by its sunshine, and
having what there is of its human as well as aerial ozone flash'd upon
me now for only three or four days, I am very much like a man feels
sometimes toward certain people he meets with, and warms to, and
hardly knows why.
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