are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other.  At a little plateau among snowy ridges a few miles east of Bridger’s Pass, the driver leans over and tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that they have reached the summit-level.  Then, if you have a particle of true cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out.  There is something indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere.  You have reached the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two opposite ways.  Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander’s Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or even Liverpool.  To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near its source,—­a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the Platte,—­whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist,—­whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea.  Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with Nature.  Fort Bridger, a little over a day’s stage-ride east of the city, is a large and quite a populous trading-post and garrison of the United States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers, whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief, and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the surrounding scenery.

Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere carved by the hand of Nature.  Before we came to the North Platte, we were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped