IX.

GREAT SALT LAKE CITY.

How was I to be greeted by the Mormons? That was rather an exciting question with me. I had been told on the plains that a certain humorous sketch of mine (written some years before) had greatly incensed the Saints, and a copy of the Sacramento Union newspaper had a few days before fallen into my hands in which a Salt Lake correspondent quite clearly intimated that my reception at the new Zion might be unpleasantly warm. I ate my dinner moodily and sent out for some.cigars. The venerable clerk brought me six. They cost only two dollars. They were procured at a store near by. The Salt Lake House sells neither cigars nor liquors.

I smoke in my room, having no heart to mingle with the people in the office.

Dr. Hingston "thanks God he never wrote against the Mormons," and goes out in search of a brother Englishman. Comes back at night and says there is a prejudice against me. Advises me to keep in. Has heard that the Mormons thirst for my blood and

are on the look-out for me.

on

Under these circumstances I keep in.

The next day is Sunday, and we go to the Tabernacle in the morning. The Tabernacle is located street, and is a long rakish building of adobe, capable of seating some twenty-five hundred persons. There is a wide platform and a rather large pulpit at one end of the building, and at the other end is another platform for the choir. A young Irishman of the name of Sloan preaches a sensible sort of discourse, to which a Presbyterian could hardly have objected. Last night this same Mr. Sloan enacted a character in a rollicking Irish farce at the theatre! And he played it well, I was told: not so well, of course, as the great Dan Bryant could but I fancy he was more at home in the Mormon pulpit than Daniel would have been.

The Mormons, by the way, are pre-eminently an amusement-loving people, and the Elders pray for the success of their theatre with as much earnestness as they pray for anything else. The congregation doesn't startle us. It is known, I fancy, that the heads of the Church are to be absent to-day, and the attendance is slim. There are no ravishingly beautiful women present, and no positively ugly ones. The men are fair to middling. They will never be slain in cold blood for their beauty, nor shut up in jail for their homeliness.

1

There are some good voices in the choir to-day, but the orchestral accompaniment is unusually slight. Sometimes they introduce a full brass and string band in church. Brigham Young says the devil has monopolized the good music long enough, and it is high time the Lord had a portion of it. Therefore trombones are tooted on Sundays in Utah as well as on other days; and there are some splendid musicians there. The orchestra in Brigham Young's theatre is quite equal to any in Broadway. There is a youth in Salt Lake City (I forget his name) who plays the cornet like a North American angel.

Mr. Stenhouse relieves me of any anxiety I had felt in regard to having my swan-like throat cut by the Danites, but thinks my wholesale denunciation of a people I had never seen was rather hasty. The following is the paragraph to which the Saints objected. It occurs in an "Artemus Ward" paper

on Brigham Young, written some years ago:

"I girded up my Lions and fled the Seen. I packt up my duds and left Salt Lake, which is a 2nd Soddum and Germorer, inhabited by as theavin' & onprincipled a set of retchis as ever drew Breth in eny spot on the Globe."

I had forgotten all about this, and as Elder Stenhouse read it to me "my feelings may be better imagined than described," to use language I think I

have heard before. I pleaded, however, that it was a purely burlesque sketch, and that this strong paragraph should not be interpreted literally at all. The Elder didn't seem to see it in that light, but we parted pleasantly.

X.

THE MOUNTAIN FEVER.

Go back to my hotel and go to bed, and I do not get up again for two weary weeks. I have the mountain fever (so called in Utah, though it closely resembles the old-style typhus), and my case is pronounced dangerous. I don't regard it so. I don't, in fact, regard anything. I am all right, myself. My poor Hingston shakes his head sadly, and Dr. Williamson, from Camp Douglas, pours all kinds of bitter stuff down my throat. I drink his health in a dose of the cheerful beverage known as jalap, and thresh the sheets with my hot hands. I address large assemblages, who have somehow got into my room, and I charge Dr. Williamson with the murder of Luce, and Mr. Irwin, the actor, with the murder of Shakspeare. I have a lucid spell now and then, in one of which James Townsend, the landlord, enters. He whispers, but I hear what he says far too distinctly: "This man can have anything and everything he wants; but I'm no hand for a sick room. I never could see anybody die."

That was cheering, I thought. The noble Califor