A Private Chivalry

TIME was, and is no more, when invalids, hopeful and hopeless, thronged the eastern foothills of the Rockies till there was no longer houseroom for them in the cities, and a new word "lunger" was grafted upon the exuberant stock of Western folk speech to distinguish them. Unlike the pioneers of a still earlier day, who crossed the plains with their worldly possessions snugly sheltered beneath the canvas tilt of a single prairie schooner, these migrants for health's sake were chiefly of the class which neither toils nor spins, and to the foothill cities they presently added suburbs architecturally characteristic each after its kind. In these suburbs the trim-built town house of New England is the commonest type, but the more florid style of the middle West is not lacking, and now and then, in the roomier city fringe, there are replicas done in red brick of the low-storied, wide-verandaed country house of the South.

Such was the home of the Langfords in the Highlands of North Denver. Driven from the ancestral acres in the blue-grass region of Tennessee in the late afternoon of his life, the judge had determined to make the new home in the life-giving altitudes as nearly like the old as money and the materials at hand would compass, and he had succeeded passing well. He had bought acres where others bought lots, and the great roomy house, with its low-pitched roof and wide verandas on three sides, stood in the midst of whatsoever Tennessee greenery would stand transplantation from the blue-grass region to the less genial climate of the clear-skied altitudes.