In its mountain setting, with the pink sandstone cliffs rising abruptly behind it, this castle of the General's is one of the most dramatic homes I have ever seen. There is a superb austerity about it, which makes it very different from the large homes of Broadmoor, at the other side of Colorado Springs. As I have already mentioned, one of these is a replica of the Grand Trianon; others are Elizabethan and Tudor, and many of them are very fine, but the house of houses at Colorado Springs is "El Pomar," the residence of the late Ashton H. Potter. I do not know a house in the United States which fits its setting better than this one, or which is a more perfect thing from every point of view. It is a one-story building of Spanish architecture--a style which, to my mind, fits better than any other, the sort of landscape in which plains and mountains meet. Houses as elaborate as the Grand Trianon, always seem to me to lend themselves best to a rather formal, park-like country which is flat, or nearly so; while Elizabethan and adapted Tudor houses of the kind one sees at Broadmoor, seem to cry out for English lawns, and great lush-growing trees to soften the hard lines of roof and gable. Such houses may be set in rolling country with good effect, but in the face of the vast mountain range which dominates this neighborhood, the most elaborate architecture is so completely dwarfed as to seem almost ridiculous. Architecture cannot compete with the Rocky Mountains; the best thing it can do is to submit to them: to blend itself into the picture as unostentatiously as possible. And that is what "El Pomar" does. CHAPTER XXXIII CRIPPLE CREEK One day, during our stay at Colorado Springs, we were invited to take a trip to Cripple Creek. Driving to the station a friend, a resident of the Springs, pointed out to me a little clay hillock, beside the road. "That," he said, "is what we call Mount Washington." "I don't see the resemblance," I remarked. "Well," he explained, "the top of that little hump has an elevation of about six thousand three hundred feet, which is exactly the height of Mount Washington. You see our mountains, out here, begin where yours, in the East, leave off."