The sweet taste which this diabolical reflection seemed to leave in Heber Kimball’s mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had ever felt regarding either saint or sinner.  But it is costly to smite an apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by telling him I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture-room full of Sanitary-Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands, sweethearts, and brothers in the Union army.  I didn’t know whether saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who’d get scraped a little.

To resume Brigham for the last time.  After a conversation about the Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Government, averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go farther to protect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on every war-question, and tactfully changed the subject to the beauty of the Opera-House.

As to the Indians, let me remark by-the-by, I did not tell him that I understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that direction.  Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Goshoots, Pi-Utes, and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive raid since the Mormons entered Utah.  In every settlement of the saints you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair cut in the Indian fashion, and speak all the surrounding dialects with native fluency.  Whenever a fatly provided wagon-train is to be attacked, a fine herd of emigrants’ beeves stampeded, the mail to be stopped, or the Gentiles in any way harassed, these desperadoes stain their skin, exchange their clothes for a breech-clout, and rally a horde of the savages, whose favor they have always propitiated, for the ambush and massacre, which in all but the element of brute force is their work in plan, leadership, and execution.  I have multitudes of most interesting facts to back this assertion, but am already in danger of overrunning my allowed limits.

The Opera-House was a subject we could agree upon.  I was greatly astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.  It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five hundred more, when, as in the present instance, the stage is thrown into the parquet, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for dancing.  Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful structure, of stone, brick, and stucco.  My greatest surprise was excited by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the moulding about the proscenium-boxes.  President Young, with a proper pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by indigenous and saintly hands.