The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and smiling Mormon settlements.  Everything has been done for the farm,—­nothing for the home.  That blessed old Anglo-Saxon idea seems everywhere quite extinct.  The fields are billowing over with dense, golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass, the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its well-oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit-trees are thrifty,—­but the house is desolate.  Even where its owner is particularly well off, and its architecture somewhat more ambitious than the average, (though, as yet, this superiority is measured by little more than the difference between logs and clapboards,) there is still no air about it of being the abode of happy people, fond of each other, and longing after it in absence.  It looks like a mere inclosure to eat and sleep in.  Nobody seems to have taken any pride in it, to feel any ambition for it.  Woman’s tender little final touches, which make a dear refuge out of a mud-cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only a home in the moulding-clay,—­those dexterous ornamentations which make so little mean so much,—­the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing into the fragrant welcome of many Junes,—­the trellised Madeira-vines,—­the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to the very brink of frost,—­all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure.  Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one.  Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers owning a common husband,—­and we could easily understand how neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by them in such unhappy partnership.  The humblest New-England cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in front; but how quickly would these wither, if the neat, brisk house-mistress owned her husband in common with Mrs. Deacon Pratt next door!

The first Mormon household I ever visited belonged to a son of the famous Heber Kimball, Brigham Young’s most devoted follower, and next to him in the Presidency.  It was the last stage-station but one before we entered Salt Lake, situated at the bottom of a green valley in Parley’s Canon (named after the celebrated Elder, Parley Pratt); and as it looked like the residence of a well-to-do farmer, I went in, and asked for a bowl of bread and milk,—­the greatest possible luxury after a life of bacon and salt-spring water, such as we had been leading in the mountains.  A fine-looking, motherly woman, with a face full of character, gray-haired, and about sixty years old, rose promptly to grant my request, and while the horses were changing I had ample time to make the acquaintance of two pretty young girls, hardly over twenty, holding two infants, of ages not more than three months apart.