have Heaven make out all the specifications for a Mormon Winter Garden.

The air was busy with the sound of the carpenter's hammer, putting down the last planks of the temporary floor flush with the stage, and covering the entire parquet; and between the strokes rose a hum of women's voices, or above them every now and then a shrill call or a ringing laugh. The talk was polyglot; for among the sisters who were dressing the theatre were not only the elder comers and experienced Saints, but recent arrivals from numerous nationalities. I noticed in the bustling little groups that sat binding the ropes with evergreens after the manner of an Eastern Christmas church-dressing, or supplied the binders with culled cedar sprigs from the big fragrant heaps, a number of fresh Scandinavians, and many more of those unmistakable German bauerinnen, whose short blue petticoats and elephantine ankles make such a large portion of the picture presented by every station platform in the West where an emigrant train lies by on the switch. The Kätchens and Gretchens had not lost a single one of those distinctive peculiarities which mark them anywhere between Castle Garden and St. Louis, except that their big, honest, glass-blue eyes looked a trifle less dolly and wondering. Well might this be, after their bumps of the marvelous had been calloused by such tremendous thumps of impression as even a Yankee gets from twelve hundred miles of Plains and Rocky Mountain travelling, to say nothing of the peculiar and special blow which must have been inflicted on candidates for female saintship by the realities of Mormondom itself. Otherwise they were the same sturdy, stumpy little peasants as huddle about the

Battery on the arrival of a Bremen bark, with the same linty locks straggling from under their caps over full-moon faces of that curious color produced by tan upon a blonde complexion. The sun which had flooded them throughout their Overland journey, had only intensified the photography of Bavarian harvest-fields and Prussian turnip-patches. Intermingling, or rather forming interspersed groups, with these (for as yet they had learned no common tongue) were Kent and Surrey hop-pickers; sprightly Welsh shepherdesses, brightest-eyed, sturdiest-calved, blackest-haired of all; Irishwomen (the smallest lot, as belonging to a race preoccupied by other than the Mormon despotism) and a few Americans, who, wherever they appeared, were the dominant sisters of the circle. I wandered among them, and universally found cheerful, contented faces, except where middle age, attained before the peasant left Europe, had made indelible the traces of servile labor and hardship. Nowhere, however, could I find a countenance which even so much as once in its life-time had been enlivened by the higher class of thoughts and emotions. The better brute faculties were represented everywhere. Industrious patience, good nature, dog fidelity, sullen strength, these were ubiquitous; and I could well believe that in many cases the emancipation of such elements from the hopeless servility of peasant life in Europe had been a true improvement and elevation, even though the change had been from a professed Christianity into a real Mormonism. Certainly the monogamy of a Staffordshire potter's hovel, or of a den in the mining districts of England, on the gauge of progressive civilization is several notches below the polygamy of Utah. Cer

tain apes are monogamic, but their females would be bettered by becoming women, though the transformation involved their participation in a Tartar harem. Thus, despite our view of it in the absolute, Mormonism may prove, in transitu, a valuable ascending step to many wretched slaves among the laboring classes of Europe, who now are women but in name, bearing all the pangs and insults of the man, with an addition of maternal throes and wearinesses. I felt glad to think thus as I went looking about me among the new-come women dressing the Salt Lake Theatre. Here they were not doing field labor, hoeing, carrying asses' burdens. Many of them, in twining these pretty cedar wreaths and making these ropes of fragrant greenery, had the first womanly work of their lives, the first work to be sung or smiled over, to call out the higher faculties of soul or fingers. Some of them were singing, many smiling, and I felt a mixture of pain and pleasure as I saw how awkward their features were at it. It was as if the facial muscles were taking an apprenticeship at expressing happy thoughts, and their hearts had a furlough to be glad for the first time. What struck me most strangely was the entire absence of representatives from the upper ranks of Mormon woman society, for comparatively, at any rate, there are such ranks. At the East, even among the monogamists of a society so full of imperfections as our own, such like festival preparation rallies all the squires' and lawyers' wives, the ladies from the first village families, those who are conspicuous at the quiltings, those who lead in the Dorcas and sewing societies. No women corresponding to those who make vestry-rooms and school-houses cheery throughout the week before

Eastern Christmas were anywhere visible among the evergreens of the Salt Lake Theatre.

On the stage I was introduced to several prominent men of the Territory who were superintending the work. They were capable, intelligent-looking people, and so well dressed that they might easily have passed for Gentile visitors. The day of religious costuming seems to have gone by everywhere. The “great human average" runs through sects as well as nationalities; in cities at least, Quakers manifest their adherence to the meeting by their primness in the clothes of the world, rather than by the assumption of any uniform garb of their own. Similarly among the ruling Mormons, singularity of dress or hair-cut has fallen out of favor, on the very admirable principle of Goethe (I quote "Wilhelm Meister" from memory) that he who differs from his fellows in some chief particular should be all the more careful to conform to them in non-essentials. Thus a very influential Mormon then standing on the stage, and a son-in-law of Prophet-President Brigham, was really a surprise to me when I discovered his belonging to the Saints, since on Broadway he would have passed for a thriving Boston merchant or a Lowell manufacturer. He had the clean-shaven, keen-featured face of a New England business man still clinging to the habitudes of twenty years ago. (I set the chronological limit to save the former epithet, "cleanshaven," which is distinctive of no class of sensible men at the present day, though occasional individuals of sense, through eccentricity or misfortune, are still found beardless.) The governing classes on the stage (there were several of that denomination) were as unmistakable in the crowd of workmen and workwomen as they are everywhere else.

Out of all present, I recognized one man as the ruling spirit the moment I set my eyes on him, and it required but small discrimination of character to do so. He more fully met my preconceived ideal than any of the Saints I saw on that or any other time. He might have stood for a full-length statue of "The Mormon." Perhaps because my mind felt flattered to find its preconceptions so fully realized, even where some of them were not entirely just to the Saints in general, my attention had become pleasurably riveted upon him several minutes before our cicerone had an opportunity to introduce us to his apostolic notice. He was a man apparently somewhat over sixty, but showing none of the infirmity of years. He was erect, portly, full-chested, broad-shouldered, powerfully made, about six feet high, and weighed two hundred pounds. Perhaps he was originally a blacksmith, as they say; he may have combined that employment with the agricultural calling, which he afterward told me occupied his youth. He was built like a cyclops, at any rate. Everything about him spoke of rude animal vigor. His face was very striking a compound of keen wit, finesse, insight into character, with native sensuality enough to furnish the basis for a Vitellius. Perhaps it was the latter half of his face which made him satisfy my ideal of "The Mormon," and there I was unjust; for on close study I did not find that the basis of this remarkable people's fanaticism was laid in sensuality, however much the fact of polygamy might superficially point to that conclusion. Neither would it be just to call sensuality this particular Mormon's governing trait. His bright black eyes were small and twinkling; his well proportioned nose regular, but coarse.

His