or credulity of the Plains. In fact, that prince of romancers, Baron Munchausen, seemed to preside over the country, or the people to be his lineal descendants, almost everywhere. FOOTNOTE: [3] See Appendix. CHAPTER V. DENVER AND THE MINES. We reached Denver Sept. 5th, and remained there several days. Approaching by the South Platte, you catch sight of the town a mile or two away, when crossing a "divide," and are surprised at its size and importance. Ten years before, there was not an inhabitant there; but now she claimed seven thousand or more, and boasted with reason, of two hundred and fifty houses erected that year. Moreover, the new buildings were chiefly of brick or stone, while the old ones were log or frame. At the junction of the South Platte and Cherry Creek her streets are well-laid out, mostly at right-angles, and for suburbs she has the boundless Plains. Apparently on a plateau, she is nevertheless really a mountain city; for at St. Louis you are only three hundred feet above the sea, at Omaha nine hundred feet, while at Denver you have got up imperceptibly to four thousand feet above the sea, or higher than our average Alleghanies. Her climate is pure and dry, without rain or frost for many months in the year--the paradise of consumptives--and for scenery, she has the ever-glorious Rocky Mountains. Already she had six churches, two seminaries, two daily papers, a banking-house with a business of twelve millions a year, a U. S. Mint, a theatre, and hotels and saloons unnumbered, though these last it was thought were diminishing. Until recently, gambling-hells had also flourished openly on her streets, with their usual concomitants of drunkenness and affrays. But some months before, a Judge Gale--backed by a strong public opinion--had taken hold of the gamblers, and squelched them effectually. Like other "peculiar institutions," they died hard, raising large sums of money to prolong their evil life--threatening some men and bribing, or trying to bribe, others; but Judge Lynch came to the support of Judge Gale, with the counter-threat of "a cottonwood limb and a rope," and so gamblers ceased to rule in Denver. The happy change was freely commented on, and now that it had come, people wondered why they had endured the blacklegs so long. Denver was now evidently aspiring to better things--to "sweeter manners, purer laws." Her merchants and bankers were building themselves homes, sending east for their families, and settling down, as if to stay. Though not so law-abiding and Sabbath-loving, as our eastern cities, yet her churches were well-attended; and her Episcopal Bishop (Randall), we found scouring the country with all the earnestness and zeal of an old-time missionary, or Methodist itinerant. Band and gown, stole and chasuble, and other ritualistic millenary, he affected but little; but he preached Christ and Him crucified with a tenderness