in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead of an author.  But he would have felt no unkindness toward me on that account.  I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met.  He was mere executive force, from which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in the hand of Brigham.  He was everywhere known as the Destroying Angel, but he seemed to have little disagreement with his toddy, and took his meals regularly.  He has two very comely and pleasant wives.  Brigham has about seventy, Heber about thirty.  The seventy of Brigham do not include those spiritually married, or “sealed” to him, who may never see him again after the ceremony is performed in his back-office.  These often have temporal husbands, and marry Brigham only for the sake of belonging to his lordly establishment in heaven.

Salt Lake City, Brigham told me, he believed to contain sixteen thousand inhabitants.  Its houses are built generally of adobe or wood,—­a few of stone,—­and though none of them are architecturally ambitious, almost all have delightful gardens.  Both fruit- and shade-trees are plenty and thrifty.  Indeed, from the roof of the Opera-House the city looks fairly embowered in green.  It lies very picturesquely on a plain quite embasined among mountains, and the beauty of its appearance is much heightened by the streams which run on both sides of all the broad streets, brought down from the snow-peaks for purposes of irrigation.  The Mormons worship at present in a plain, low building,—­I think, of adobe,—­called the Tabernacle, save during the intensely hot weather, when an immense booth of green branches, filled with benches, accommodates them more comfortably.  Brigham is erecting a Temple of magnificent granite, (much like the Quincy,) about two hundred feet long by one hundred and twenty-five feet wide.  If this edifice be ever finished, it will rank among the most capacious religious structures of the continent.

The lake from which the city takes its name is about twenty miles distant from the latter, by a good road across the level valley-bottom.  Artistically viewed, it is one of the loveliest sheets of water I ever saw,—­bluer than the intensest blue of the ocean, and practically as impressive, since, looking from the southern shore, you see only a water-horizon.  This view, however, is broken by a magnificent mountainous island, rising, I should think, seven or eight hundred feet from the water, half a dozen miles from shore, and apparently as many miles in circuit.  The density of the lake-brine has been under- instead of over-stated.  I swam out into it for a considerable distance, then lay upon my back on, rather than in, the water, and suffered the breeze to waft me landward again.  I was blown to a spot where the lake was only four inches deep, without grazing my back, and did not know I had got within my depth again until I depressed my hand a trifle and touched bottom!  It is a mistake to call this lake azoic.  It has no fish, but breeds myriads of strange little maggots, which presently turn into troublesome gnats.  The rocks near the lake are grandly castellated and cavernous crags of limestone, some of it finely crystalline, but most of it like our coarser Trenton and Black-River groups.  There is a large cave in this formation, ten minutes’ climb from the shore.