each.  Those who preferred official rank could buy the title of Councillor of State or of Commissioner of Police.  New and profitable offices were created and disposed of to the highest bidder,—­inspectorships of wood, of hay, of wine, of butter.  Arbitrary power, no matter whether we call it sovereign prince or sovereign people, falls instinctively into the same ways in all times and countries.  The Demos of a neighboring State, absolute and greedy as any monarch, have furnished us with plenty of examples of this last imposition upon industry.  Zealous servants are rewarded and election-expenses paid by similar inspectorships and commissionerships, not only useless, but injurious, to every one except those who hold them.

When these resources became exhausted, a capitation-tax was laid, followed by an assessment of one tenth, and the adulteration of the currency.  The King cut off the pension-list, sold his plate, and dismissed his servants.  Misery and starvation laid waste the realm.  At last, the pompous, “stagy” old monarch died, full of infirmities and of humiliations; and the road from the Boulevard to St. Denis was lined with booths as for a fete, and the people feasted, sang, and danced for joy that the tyrant was in his coffin.  Time, the galantuomo, amply avenged Fouquet.

* * * * *

AMONG THE MORMONS.

The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious with the genius of Mormonism.  Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,—­this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous canons through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.

We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but, in reality, they reach all the way between those places.  They are not a chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest.  For six hundred miles the overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows, lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at Bridger’s Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake.  Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike’s Peak till its wheels (metaphorically)