rest. If anybody asks your authority, say I told you to."

Without a moment's demur the herder obeyed the second President. I did not ask whether Brother What-d'ye-call-'um had more than one cow, and could get along without serious diminution to his milk-porridge from the loss of this one. But that was of no consequence; dictum est. That afternoon the cow went down to Church Island, and was henceforth as sacred as among the Brahmins, though in a different sense. She belonged to the Church herd — to give milk in life, beef, horn, and hide in death, for the advancement upon earth of the Saints' latter-day kingdom. Before I leave Salt Lake City I shall say more in extenso what relation "The Church" bears, not only to such waifs of emolument as this cow, but to every Mormon's entire property.

During our stay at Townsend's, we were one morning sitting on the veranda, when our landlord, a portly, kindly man, brought up a friend of his to introduce to us. It was Porter Rockwell, the Destroying Angel and chief of the Danites. Apart from his cause, I felt an abstract interest in this old fighter, and was glad to become acquainted with him. He welcomed us very cordially to Utah, and told us we ought to stay: our only bad taste was exhibited in merely going through. We could not avoid telling him, with a smile, that Utah had a reputation for stopping people who showed such taste, to take a permanent residence. He answered good-humoredly that he had heard the rumor, and intended so far to verify it that he should halt us on our way past his door, when we started to cross the desert, put our horses in his own stable, carry us to his table, and

inflict on us the penalty of a real Mormon dinnerafter which (if our horses had got through their feed) we should be let off with an admonition never to try to pass his door if we came that way again. "Bless yer soul, but we're savage!" said Porter Rockwell. "Once drew a sassige on a Yankee Gentile myselfcrammed it right down his throat with scalding hot gravy and pancakes. We Mormons torture 'em awful. The Gentile I drew the sassige on bore it like a man, and is livin' yet. Well, I'll soon see ye agin." So he shook hands with us, jumped on his mustang, and ambled away as gently as if, instead of being a destroying angel, he were a colporteur of peace tracts, or a peddler of Winslow's Soothing Syrup.

He kept his word to us, seeing us soon and frequently. Next to Brigham Young, he was the most interesting man and problem that I encountered in Utah. His personal appearance in itself was very striking. His figure was of the middle height, and very strongly made; broad across the shoulders, and set squarely on the legs. His arm was of large girth, his chest round as a barrel, and his hand looked as powerful as a grizzly bear's. His face was of the mastiff type, and its expression, fidelity, fearlessness, ferocity. A man with his massive lower jaw, firm mouth, and good-humored but steady and searching eyes of steel-blue, if his fanaticism takes the Mormon form, must infallibly become like Porter Rockwell. Organization and circumstances combine to make any such man a destroying angel. Having always felt the most vivid interest in supernatural characters of that species, I was familiar with most of them from the biblical examples of those who smote Egypt, Sodom, and Sennacherib, to the more modern Arab,

Azrael, and that famous one who descended, all whitebearded and in shining raiment from the Judges' Cave, to lead the van of Quinnipiack's forlorn hope and smite the red-skinned Philistines. Out of this mass of conflicting and particular angels I had abstracted an ideal and general angel; but when I suddenly came on a real one, in Porter Rockwell, I was surprised at his unlikeness to my thought. His hair, black and iron-gray in streaks, was gathered into a cue, just behind the apex of the skull, and twisted into a hard round bunch, confined with a comb-in nearly the same fashion as was everywhere prevalent among Eastern ladies twenty years ago. He was very obliging in his manners; placable, jocose, never extravagant when he conversed, save in burlesque. If he had been converted to Methodism in its early times, instead of Mormonism, he might have been a second Peter Cartwright, preaching and pummeling his enemies into the Kingdom instead of shooting them to Kingdom Come. No one ignorant of his career would take him on sight for a man of bad disposition in any sense. But he was that most terrible instrument which can be handled by fanaticism; a powerful physical nature welded to a mind of very narrow perceptions, intense convictions, and changeless tenacity. In his build he was a gladiator; in his humor, a Yankee lumberman; in his memory, a Bourbon; in his vengeance, an Indian. A strange mixture, only to be found on the American Conti

nent.

In the forenoon of the Fourth of July, Porter called at our hotel to invite us to take a drive with him. His carriage was a large coach of the most ancient Overland fashion, with a boot; room for nine inside (using

the swing strap in the middle), six on top, and three on the box. He had bought this vehicle at the auction of a deceased stage company's effects. It used to run from Salt Lake City to Nephi, or some other Mormon settlement, and upon its emancipation from these diurnal labors struck the eye of the angel, he told me, as the fair thing to air the angelic "ole wimmen" and the little destroying angels in. It still bore its original coat of flaming vermilion, and the name of the company, if I recollect, which used to employ its services. It was just the chariot for a large family of angelic beings, whose wings had not been sent home yet. You could have piled all the old masters' cherubim, plus the supplementary legs, into the cavern of Porter's vast coach, without their troubling each other more than the souls in the old scholastic thesis who dance on the point of a needle, besides leaving room for the parental destroyers on top and box.

Porter, in his desire to do the hospitalities of the occasion in the most graceful manner, proposed to mount the box, and take the reins himself. But we represented, as was true, that we should feel much more pleased and honored if he gave us his company inside the stage. We wished to converse with and see this interesting man,-not to ride behind him,— and so persuaded him to let a stable-boy drive for us.

I do not know if I have stated that we had been rejoined by our two companions, who had preceded us on our way from Denver to Utah as far as Virginia Dale. These gentlemen, with Porter, our artist, and myself, composed the party that rode out to visit the Springs.

These are situated at a distance of two or three

miles from the northern border of the city. The road thither leads along the base of a peculiar series of hills skirting the higher ranges in all directions about the city; a formation principally limestone, and terraced in planes accurately corresponding, across valleys of upheaval and erosion that intervene. These mark the successive periods of depression for the level of that great sea which once filled the whole tract between the Uintah Range and the Snake Plateau, the Wahsatch and the Humboldt Mountains. Every sedimentary rock stands the self-registering tide-mark of an ocean which man never saw till it had shrunk to its last puddle in the present Great Salt Lake, which knew no floods, and had long eras of rest, followed by ebbs comparatively short and sudden, but outlasting a thousand generations of those pelicans, who, sole Smithsonians of the period, made meteorological investigations from the porphyritic pinnacles of their observatories across the sullen and solitary sea. In coming to speak of Salt Lake itself, I may give its geologic history more in extenso.

Behind the terraced hills which bounded the north road and rose above it to a height of from two to four hundred feet, Ensign Peak, a lofty projection of the Wahsatch, came in view at frequent intervals. This is the Sinai of Mormonism, for it was on this peak that the Saints' Moses, Brigham, met the spirit of Joe Smith, and received his orders for the disposition of the people. This occurred in a vision, very shortly, if not the first night, after the tents of the faithful were pitched in sight of the valley. Near the foot of this peak gush another set of thermal waters besides those we came to visit; and Porter showed us from the window of the coach the superannuated re