mains of an arrangement which had formerly been made to bring it nearer the Salt Lake citizens by conduits and a bath-house. The Springs we sought were reached by a ride of about three miles from Townsend's, and the day being unusually hot, betrayed themselves as far as we could see by copious evapora tions, like the steam of a large laundry; hanging in the sultry air like an idle cloud over a mass of ragged rocks, on the right hand of our road. Reaching them, we alighted and spent more than an hour in their examination. The rock from which they emerge is a limestone, belonging to the terrace formation, and stands at the foot of one of the bare gray hills which rise abruptly from the road. It is honeycombed and tunneled for yards, in all directions, by vents and channels. We were told that some of the vents eject water hot enough to cook an egg in. I suppose that this statement is true, meaning a soft egg. I explored all the basins as far as I could get under the rocks which overhang them, and found several crevices where the jets scalded on instant contact, as well as several deep pools in which I could not bear my hand more than a second. But water actually boiling at the surface was nowhere visible. Even in the hottest pools I was deeply interested to find fresh-water algae growing abundantly. I had snatched up the nearest pitcher as I left the Fourth of July confusion of the hotel, intending to bring back a sample of the waters. This I now found convenient for the collection of the algae, and I nearly blistered my hands in fishing from the basins all the prettiest specimens within reach. They were very frail-more like a mucus or a jelly than a plant -- yet, even to the naked eye, distinctly organized. Their cellular structure is even more visible, now that they are dried and lying before me in the book where I pressed them, than it was in the water which bore them. I much regretted having no good blottingbook in so much of our dunnage as we had detained at Salt Lake, but, on getting back with my algæ to the hotel, made shift to use an old edition of Comstock's Mineralogy, arranging the specimens on note paper, putting them between the book-leaves, and setting the foot of my heavy fore-poster on the whole, till such time as we should "break camp" for the Desert. The method of treating these algae was similar in other respects to that observed at the seaside in collecting their marine cousins, by lady enthusiasts at the East. On reaching home with my pitcher, I emptied it into a pail of water. When I saw an alga floating naturally, I dipped my sheet of note paper under it (card-board, which is better, not being at hand), and slowly lifted it, arranging the forms with a pin, as nearly as I could in the way they swam. Some of them were a string of inflated globules, in shape like the bladder-weed of our sea-shore, but the brightest transparent emerald in color. Others were only a viscous mass like "frog-spittle," with covered but certain traces of organization. Still others were tapes and coils of a tissue simulating fibre,—the former resembling eel-grass, the latter a fine moss or lichen. Several amorphous masses, which I poked asunder, broke up into distinct and evident organisms, coming under one or another of the forms described. Even more than the absence of our albums do I regret that of the microscope, which might have enabled us to examine these specimens in their fresh state. I have nearly a hundred of the dried algæ, and hope some time to have them thoroughly treated. Their hues in nature were the emerald green I have mentioned, a delicate pink of the shade sometimes called French gray, a lilac, an ashen, an ultramarine blue, and a brown. Some of my specimens still keep their color very well. The average temperature of the water in the larger pools is 128° F. It is much higher than that under some of the jets in whose basins the algae grow. In midwinter the brook which runs from these springs is said to heat the air for many rods along the road, so that benighted people have often camped there as around a fire-place. Even on such a hot day as the Fourth of July in Salt Lake Valley, the air was perceptibly cooler after leaving the springs' vicinity. No other plant than the alga grew within reach of its waters, nor was any higher organization than the vegetable perceptible in them. That they do not contain animal life no one can positively assert, - the Great Salt Lake itself, as I myself have tested, not being devoid of such life, though its azoic character was once universally believed. Nothing of the kind, however, has yet been found in the springs. In the winter, ducks, geese, and an occasional crane or pelican, over from their cold side of the school-house at Salt Lake, with leave to stand up by the stove, huddle in the genial steam of the reedy level which drinks the springs' overflow. We now had only a few solitary magpies to cheer our way home through the hot dust. Porter Rockwell studiously avoided referring to Mormonism seriously, though he seemed willing enough to talk about it in a playful manner if any one else broached the subject. He was rough, but kind and conciliatory, in everything he said, and sometimes very amusing. A description he gave, accompanied by pantomime, of the way in which he had seen a Goshoot family sitting in a circle on their haunches when the grasshoppers were plenty, using their palms as scoops and "paying" the insects into their mouths with a windlass motion as fast as their hands could fly, was irresistibly laughable. It seemed strange to be riding in the carriage and by the side of a man, who, if universal report among the Gentiles were correct, would not hesitate to cut my throat at the Church's orders. It was like an Assyrian taking an airing in the chariot of the Angel of Death. I was not likely to become obnoxious to the Church: I certainly did not mean to be if I could help it. Knowing I had been very careful along the way from the Missouri never to express myself before anybody who might be a Mormon spy, I felt pretty tranquil upon the subject of any change in Porter Rockwell from his present agreeable relation of entertainer to the less pleasant one of executioner, though an hour's study of him enabled me to say that though, if he had it to perform, less heart might be in his execution of the latter than of the former function, there would be at any rate no less efficiency and sureness. He had the reputation of having killed many menforty, report said; and there are not lacking those who suspect him of still more. From an eye-witness following account of I received, while in Utah, the one of his vendette. A Gentile doing business in Salt Lake City during Johnston's occupation of Camp Floyd, suffered oppressive exaction from the Church authorities; and after failing, as might have been ex pected, to get a decision in his favor from a local Mormon judge and jury before whom he brought his petition for relief, he retired in a most exasperated state of mind to the United States encampment,— partly with a view to obtaining redress through Johnston, and partly for self-protection from the Danites, with whom his prosecution of the Church had made him a marked man. One day Porter Rockwell rode into Camp Floyd. At no time during Johnston's occupation was there anything but the merest farcical show of hostilities. Invader and invaded hobnobbed together at officers' quarters, over fiery glasses of "Valley Tan," (the demoniacal whiskey of the region); Saints and Gentiles winked at each other from the jury-box to the dock; the matters in dispute between Brigham Young and Buchanan were treated by all classes as a mere technical squabble, in which nobody was hurt. Yet, though the familiarity was on both sides, all the confidence was on that of the army, which got regularly plucked in every transaction, from the disgraceful treaty not to approach within forty miles of the city, to the buying of adobes, feed, and lumber. At no time during the burlesque of invasion was intercourse suspended between the Mormons and the camp. They drove a thriving business in huckstering commissariat supplies of all kinds, skins, clothes, and moccasins, horse-trading, and every other branch of traffic which can be transacted between the shrewdest of camp-followers and a petty force of soldiery, hundreds of hostile miles from their basis of supplies. The Mormons spoiled the Egyptians they despised; and the only results of the Johnston expedition were an engorgement of the Saints' exchequer, the passing of a pretty additional sum to |