When breakfast was over, the manager of the hotel invited me to accompany him up stairs to the ladies’ drawing-room, that he might introduce me to the mistress of the house and some other ladies whom I should find sitting with her. These ceremonies having been got through, I took a letter of introduction to the editor of the local news department of one of the Denver dailies. With the overflowing good-nature of his countrymen, he immediately placed himself at my service, showing me over the town, and introducing me to its notabilities. Hospitality here is plainly the order of the day; for wherever we went, invitations of one kind or another were immediately given. In a place like Denver, where even the tradition of social inequalities has been lost, and the idea and practice of equality that rule society have, in their passage across the continent, been distilled and redistilled a hundred times, you find the article in its purest possible form; men are valued only according to their personal qualities, such as their cleverness, their _bonhomie_, and their ability to make money. I give this as a preface to my Denver cicerone’s description of one of the persons to whom he was about to introduce me. ‘You must now,’ he said, ‘let me take you to Mr. A. He is quite our finest gentleman.’ I had not had many minutes’ conversation with ‘quite the finest gentleman in Denver,’ before I had reason for coinciding with the estimate of his fellow-townsmen; for among other offers of assistance and hospitality, he had given me an invitation to be his companion and guest in a long tour he was about to make in the mountains, but which, he explained, would on his part combine business with exploration and pleasure. Of course it is inconceivable that there could be any gentleman in Denver who was not in some kind of business, and ‘quite the finest gentleman’ of the place happened to be a grocer. But what of that? So is the senator for the State of New York; and Denver grocers can and do possess many of the personal qualities of gentlemen, though it may be supposed they are quite unconscious of the sense in which Charles II. used the word, when he replied to his foster-mother’s request that he would make his foster-brother a gentleman, ‘that he could make him a lord, but that God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.’ Meaning that the being, or the not being a gentleman, was a matter of birth, and of birth only.