The New Cripple Creek

The most popular train from Denver to Cripp'e Creek in these days is the "Eleven-come-Seven," which leaves Denver an hour before midnight, and arrivés atthefootof Bennett Avenue, in the metropolis of the gold-fields, at about sunrise. There is something about the name of the train, borrowed as it is from the phyraseology of the game of " craps," that smacks of chance ; and its peculiarly appropriate ;itle probably has as much to do with its popularity as has the convenience of being able to go to sleep in the State capital and to wake up in camp. The visitor, arriving at the foot of Bennett Avenue, the principal business throughfare of the town, just as ;he sun is coming up oyer Globe Hill, is apt to remark flrst upon the tempera;ure, which he find surprisingly genial as compared even with Denver, and the almost invariable absence of snow, which when one considers the altitude, 9500 feet, may be regarded as somewhat ahenomenal. But it is to be doubted ïf these circumstances occasion him as much surprise as when, a few minutes ater, having been whirled away from the handsome stone station in the 'bus, ie finds himself in the spacious lobby of a hotel that in architecture would do credit to any of the larger cities of the effete East. The stranger is accordingly not surprised when, in a subsequent walk through the lenth of Bennett Avenue, he observes its artistic shop fronts, its substantial mining exchange and bank buildings, its gilded saloons, and its attractive opera-house. The array of wares in the shop windows not infrequently causes a still further shattering of the tourist's preconceived notions. The fact that gainbling-places are -unuing wide open during the day as well as the niglit, and on Sunday as on ;he other days of the week, is about the only reminder from the Bennett Avenue stand-point, that there is a mining camp at the town's doors ; unless it happen that the conversation of the loungers on the street corners and in the barrooms be overheard, in which event the visitor's ears are smitten with a jargon in which " lodes" and " stopes" and "drifts" and cross-cuts" and whims" and "phonolit" and" porphyry" are a :ew of the more intelligible utterances, mingled with nanies of mines and mining stocks that are frequently of weird significance. But there is another side to Cripple than that presented by Bennett Avenue. The day when the town consisted of one street has long ago departed, and, as may be seen by a pauoramie view fi'Oin the crest of Gold Hill, it stretciies noiv over many acres, with the brick and stone buildingsof its " fire limita', in the centre, and its residential portion spreadirfg -mt thronsrh vallev and slope and gulcii, and far up on the sides of the billa that. surround the natural basin in which it was originally planted. Harper's Weekly.