"I want you to remember one thing," he said; "fifteen years ago we were laying out and selling town-lots for a dozen miles east of Denver; we were selling them to Easterners--for their good money. When they came out and looked for their land what did they see? They saw plains--mile after mile of plains--peopled by what? They were peopled by jackrabbits, and the jackrabbits were bald from bumping their heads against the surveyors' stakes. Until we have redeemed those lots and built our city out to them and upon them, gentlemen, we have not redeemed our promise to the East." And no one who knows Denver doubts that the time will yet come when she will redeem that promise. Her railroad may or may not come to be a transcontinental route of importance, manufacturing may or may not descend upon her with its grime and industry and wealth, but her magnificent situation there at the base of the Rockies will continue to make her at least a social factor in the gradually lengthening roll of really vital American cities. 18 TWO RIVALS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC--AND A THIRD "When you get to Portland you will see New England transplanted. You will see the most American town on the continent, bar only Philadelphia." The man on the train shrieking westward down through the marvelous valley of the Columbia spoke like an oracle. He had a little group of oddly contorted valises that bespoke him as a traveling salesman, and hence a person of some discrimination and judgment. He was ready to talk politics, war to the death on railroads, musical comedy and the condition of the markets with an equally uncertain knowledge, a fund of priceless information that never permitted itself to undergo even the slightest correction. But he was right, absolutely right, about Portland. From the cleanest railroad station that we have ever seen, even though the building is more than twenty years old, to the very crests of the fir-lined hills that wall her in, here is a town that is so absolutely American, that it seems as if she might even boast one of the innumerable George Washington headquarters somewhere on her older streets. Her downtown streets are conservatively narrow, her staunch Post Office suggests a public building in one of the older cities on the Atlantic coast, and her shops are a medley of delights, with apparently about thirty percent of them given over to the retail vending of chocolate. Our Portland guide was grieved when we made mention of this last fact. "I once went to Boston," said he, "and found it an almost continuous piano store."