ones; and though I saw multitudes of kindly, good-tempered countenances, and a score which would have been called pretty anywhere, I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search, that I had not met a single woman who looked high-toned, first-class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion,—­not a single woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study,—­not one to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for companionship in his pursuits or sympathy in his yearnings.  Because I knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a “Just as you might have expected!” I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.

I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and the Desert.  Heber Kimball, second President, (proximus longo intervallo!) Brigham’s most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter’s equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes.  His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them.  Men, everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel that we were insulting the lowest member of the demi-monde, if we uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the habitual staple of all Heber Kimball’s public sermons to the wives and daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.

Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt’s and my own eternal welfare.  He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century.  I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting.  Witness a sample:—­