I saw a man across the aisle look out of the window, scowl, rise from his seat, throw up his arms, and exclaim, addressing no one in particular: "God! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be dead!" My companion and I had been speaking of the same thing, wondering how people could endure their lives in such a place. "Come on," he said, rising. "This is the last stop before we get to Colorado. Let's get out and walk." I followed him from the car and to the station platform. Looking away from the station, we gazed upon a foreground the principal scenic grandeur of which was supplied by a hitching post. Beyond lay the inevitable main street and dismal buildings. One of them, as I recall it, was painted sky-blue, and bore the simple, unostentatious word, "Hotel." My companion gazed upon the scene for a time. He looked melancholy. Finally, without turning his head, he spoke. "How would you like to get off and spend a week here, some day?" he asked me. "You mean get off some day and spend a week," I corrected. "No, I mean get off and spend a week some day." I was still cogitating over that when the train started. We scrambled aboard and, resuming our seats in the observation car, looked back at the receding station. There, in strong black letters on a white sign, we saw, for the first time, the name of the town: Monotony! THE MOUNTAINS AND THE COAST CHAPTER XXX UNDER PIKE'S PEAK What a curious thing it is, that mental process by which a first impression of a city is summed up. A railway station, a taxicab, swift glimpses through a dirty window of streets, buildings, people, blurred together, incoherently, like moving pictures out of focus; then a quick unconscious adding of infinitesimal details and the total: "I like this city," or: "I do not like it." It was late afternoon when the train upon which we had come from eastern Kansas stopped at the Denver station--a substantial if not distinguished structure, neither new nor very old, but of that architectural period in which it was considered that a roof was hardly more essential to a station than a tower.