into houses of all curious sizes and shapes, irregularly lining the main
street. Delightfully free from conventionality are matters in these new
towns. Former notions of things go for naught. Values are in a
highly-disturbed state, and you will probably be charged more for the
privilege of sleeping somewhere on the floor than for all the refined
elegancies of the Fifth Avenue. The board-walks along the street, where
they exist at all, plainly typify this absence of a well-defined dead
level or zero-point in the popular sentiment; for the various sections
are built each upon the same eccentric plan that obtains in the
corresponding house. The result is an irregular succession of steps
equally irregular, with enough literal jumping-off places to relieve any
possible monotony attending the promenade. If the growth of the town
seems to continue satisfactory, its houses--at least those in or near
its central portions--begin gradually to pass through the next stage in
their development. During this interesting period, which might be called
their chrysalid state, they are twisted and turned, sometimes sawn
asunder, parts lopped off here and applied elsewhere, and all those
radical changes made which would utterly destroy anything possessed of
protean possibilities inferior to those of the common Western frame
house. But, as a final result of this treatment and some small additions
of new material, at last emerges the shapely and often artistic
cottage, resplendent in paint, and bearing small resemblance to the
slab-built barn which forms its framework. If the sometime camp becomes
a city--if Auraria grows into a Denver and Fontaine develops into
Pueblo--the frame houses will sooner or later share a common fate, that
of being mounted on wheels or rollers for a journey suburbward, to make
room for the substantial blocks of brick or stone. By this curious
process of evolution do most of our Western towns rapidly acquire more
or less of a metropolitan appearance.