lems of hydraulics and engineering where their ancestors began. When we see the blunders frequently made by nations building on that aggregation of past experiments and generalizations known as science, we shall not wonder that one painfully constructed conduit intended to supply the Saints with water, refused to fall in with its builders' wishes, from the fact that it sloped up toward the city instead of down. The successful portion of their result remains. It is ample for their present purposes, and is one of the earliest novelties which strike a purely American traveller passing through their streets.

On each side of the highway one is surprised to see a small, but rapid and unfailing stream, running in what we should call the gutter. No artificial means are taken to protect it. It is not piped, nor tiled, nor sluiced; the utmost that is anywhere done for it is to pave its channel, two or three feet in breadth, with uncemented cobble-stones. But this is the aqueduct. From this open gutter, the inhabitants of Salt Lake City, now numbering between seventeen and eighteen thousand people, draw their entire supply of water for all purposes whatsoever. To be sure a few wells have been sunk in different portions of the city; Townsend, our landlord, has one of them in his back yard; but the supply which they afford is only a drop in the bucket compared with that running along the curbs, and even to the taste of a new-comer altogether inferior to the latter.

All the earlier associations of an Eastern man connect the gutter with ideas of sewerage; and a day or two must pass before he can accustom himself to the sight of his waiter dipping up from the street the pitcher of drinking water for which he has rung, or the

pailful which is going into the kitchen to boil his dinner, and into the laundry to wash his clothes. The novelty of the sensation, however, soon disappears when he pushes his investigations from street to street, and nowhere finds impurity of any kind mingling with the rivulet which runs clear and pellucid before his own door. Dead leaves and sand, the same foreign matters as the wind drifts into any forest spring, are necessarily found in such an open conduit; but no garbage, nothing offensive of any kind, disturbs its purity.

Though there must needs be some unmanifested legislation upon the subject, the water seems to take care of itself; there are no regulations posted for its protection; the gutters are under the surveillance of no visible police. A Mormon citizen need hardly be forbidden to throw ashes, or slops, or swill into the water on which he and his neighbors depend for comfort, cleanliness, and even life itself. I never saw anything done to mar the purity of this paragon of gutters by the littlest child or most ignorant stranger.

But this gutter has an agricultural as well as a domestic function to perform. Across the sidewalk in front of every citizen's inclosure runs a narrow channel, sometimes tiled over, sometimes a mere open depression such as might be scratched with a hoe, leading from the outer and public stream to the inner and private domain. The simplest of sluicegates, a smooth board, a mere shingle, shuts the curb end of this channel. It seems an easy matter to pull it up. A baby could lift it, speaking after the manner of muscles and tendons. But the late lamented Windship could not stir it, speaking "in foro conscientiæ." Starr King used to tell with great gusto

the story of a New England official, small, unusually small, in the respect of avoirdupois, but great in soul, who, on being threatened with personal violence by the malcontent whom he was sent to arrest, replied, "Shake me? Shake me? When you shake me, you shake the State of Massachusetts!" Similarly, the person who inconsiderately lifts that shingle, lifts the Church of the Latter-day Saints; and that, as my old pioneer Comstock would say, "is a pretty hefty pull for any man."

The water of Mormondom, like everything else vital, except the contumacious air which has not yet been brought to its bearings, is the property and the concern of the Church. The Church therefore appoints a water-warden, whose business it is to see that the supply gets apportioned on principles of equity to every man's close, so far as he has reduced it to cultivation. Sometimes, when the previous winter's snow has been comparatively scanty on the mountain-tops (as was the case during the winter precedent to this particular summer of which I speak), great discretion is necessary in the allotment of the shares devoted to irrigation. A scheme is carefully laid out by the water-warden, calculated for the portion of the common territory which each land-holder owns, and showing as delicately as possible, by the necessarily rude means of measurement, just how much water per diem falls to the share of each cultivated lot in the city. With this scheme in hand, the water-warden daily goes his rounds, and lifts the sluice-gates accordingly. Thus, for instance, Brother Brown's lot is twice the area of Brother Perkins's immediately adjoining; therefore the warden lifts Brother Brown's gate from 9 until 11 o'clock A. M., Brother Perkins's gate meanwhile remain

ing shut. At 11 o'clock Brother Brown's gate is shut, and from that time till noon Brother Perkins has his gate "histed." This system accords with a state of society patriarchally simple; and the existence of such a state of society among the Mormons is sufficiently indicated by the fact that the misdemeanor of "histing" one's own gate is almost, if not entirely, unknown to the calendar of the ecclesiastical court.

Inside the land-holder's fence the apparatus for the distribution of his share to the thirsty soil is no less simple than effective. Across the land which he cultivates runs a net-work of shallow furrows or scratches connected with the channel coming under his fence from the gutter. As the water is let in to him it finds its way through this right-angled system of channels, and is rapidly drunk up by the planted squares between them. If he is an enthusiast in horticulture, and has particular beds or single plants which are his favorites, he leads a private tidbit (if I may be allowed that term for anything fluid) to the roots of his pet, by opening a temporary channel from the main furrow with his cane or the toe of his boot. The associations of Palestine throng everywhere throughout Mormondom, and with special cogency they came upon me here. I remembered the declaration of the Psalmist, "Thou turnest men's hearts as the rivers of water are turned," in connection with another scriptural expression: "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." Nowhere on this side of the Holy Land could the preacher find such an illustration for the first text. The proprietor's foot made a little scratch toward the root of a Lawton blackberry he was trying; the activity he put

forth was nearly unconscious, but the longed-for moisture crept toward the delicate thirsty spongioles, and by one slight contraction of a human muscle, the prosperity of that strange orphan, that banished scion among shrubs, was permanently secured. How much of the Bible's poetry we lose through our ignorance of physical geography! Henceforth to the Lawton blackberry, the cloudless sun, which had shone but to wilt it before, was a guide luring it upward with a golden finger. So the proprietor's furrow, scratched with a mere boot-tip, had instantly changed a curse into a blessing; and the wilting, parching, blasting enemy was in an instant converted to the best of friends. The poor little spindling thorny canes found the sunlight "at peace with them," as the rivulets of water were turned to give them drink. This is but one of the multitudinous, even constant illustrations of some Old Testament statement found among the Mormons, whether they be citizens or agriculturists. Indeed, the whole Mormon polity is only a fresh realization of the elder and original Jewish life.

The freshly arrived Gentile is surprised at the paucity of women in the streets of Salt Lake City, and still more so by the appearance of the few who do manifest themselves. I had expected to find the feminine element largely predominating on the sidewalks of a nation whose essential characteristic is disproportion of the sexes on the woman's side. But the settlements of Colorado (a Territory in which the disproportion in the opposite direction is something quite appalling) are gay with the ornamental portion of the race, compared with the thoroughfares of Mormondom. Any sunshiny day in Denver or Central City brings out on the promenade a greater number