Aside from its clubs Colorado Springs has all the other things which go to the making of a pleasant city. The Burns Theater is a model of what a theater should be. The Antlers Hotel would do credit to the shores of Lake Lucerne. Where the "antlers" part of it comes in, I am unable to say, but as nothing else was lacking, from the kitchen, down stairs, to Pike's Peak looming up in the back yard, I have no complaint to make. I suppose that every one who has heard of Colorado Springs at all, associates it with the famous Garden of the Gods. Before I started on my travels I was aware of the fact that the two great natural wonders of the East are Niagara Falls and the insular New Yorker. I knew that the great, gorgeous, glittering galaxy of American wonders was, however, in the West, but the location and character of them was somewhat vague in my mind. I knew, of course, that Pike's Peak was a large mountain. I knew that the giant redwoods were in California. But for the rest, I had the Grand Cañon, the Royal Gorge, and the Garden of the Gods associated in my mind together as rival attractions. I do not know why this was so, excepting that I had been living on Manhattan Island, where information is notoriously scarce. Now, though I saw the Royal Gorge, though I rode through it in the cab of a locomotive, with my hair standing on end, and though I found it "as advertised," I have no idea of trying to describe it, more than to say that it is a great cleft in the pink rocks through which run a river and a railroad, and that how the latter managed to keep out of the former was a constant source of wonder to me. As for the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, it affects those who behold it with a kind of literary asthma. They desire to describe it; some try, passionately; but they only wheeze and look as though they might explode. Since it is generally admitted that no one who has seen it can describe it, the task would manifestly devolve upon some one who has not seen it, and that requirement is filled by me. I have not seen it. I am not impressed by it at all. I am able to speak of it with coherence and restraint. But even that I shall not do. With the Garden of the Gods it is different. The place irritated me. For if ever any spot was outrageously overnamed, it is that one. As a little park in the Catskills it might be all well enough, but as a natural wonder in the Rocky Mountains, with Pike's Peak hanging overhead, it is a pale pink joke. If I had my way I should take its wonder-name away from it, for the name is too fine to waste, and a thousand spots in Colorado are more worthy of it.