erly, we descended among bold limestone crags and masses of debris, scantily patched with artemisia, squab cactus, and the thistly Cirsium, to the level of the great basin. A mile or two further, and we got our first blue glimpse of the lake. A fifteen minutes' ride, and Black Rock rose grim and ugly, like the foundation of some ruined round tower, across the end of our road, seeming to shut it in. The beetling precipices of limestone, rent with innumerable clefts and fissures, came down close upon our left hand, and we stopped just where they crowded us to the brink of the sea.

We had expected a grim and desolate landscape; a sullen waste of brine, stagnating along low reedy shores, black as Acheron, gloomy as the sepulchre of Sodom. Never had Nature a greater surprise for us. The view was one of the most charming which could be imagined. Its elements of sublimity were many, but beauty was its most impressive characteristic, and the word "lovely" occurred to us instantly as its fittest description.

On our left and western side, as we faced the sea, the lateral ranges of the Oquirrh decreased in height until they melted into vapory streaks of pale turquoise on the far horizon, their northward terminations forming bold headlands, or long, low promontories, with dreamy bays setting back into the indentations of the coast between them. The coast line in that direction had a southwesterly trend for about thirty miles from Black Rock, at which distance occurs the farthest point to which the lake extends southerly. All the headlands within sight-some of them apparently possessing an elevation of fifteen hundred or two thousand feet-exhibited that gorgeous va

riety and brilliancy of tints which we remarked on the faces of the Wahsatch and Oquirrh; the limestone rock, in many places crystalline, shining in the sun like chased silver, or iron at a white heat; the conglomerates, the metamorphic and the volcanic strata, here and there striated with bands of the same silvery lustre, but mainly characterized by different shades of red, graded from the nearest positive carmine to the most distant flushed with a faint hint of pink almost evanescent, exquisitely delicate and tender, like the merest glaze of rose-madder over a ground of cream. To the northeast the shore was comparatively low and uninteresting, possessing the characteristics of that plain whose edge it was, the level on which Salt Lake City lies, and on which we had spent the three hours between the city and the Oquirrh. From our feet to the northwestern horizon stretched the sea like a pavement of pure sapphire, flecked here and there with drifting whirls of marble dust. It may have been imagination, but I could not help thinking that the excessive specific gravity of the lake-brine, even had we never heard of it, must have revealed itself in the heavy swing of the waves like that of quicksilver rather than of water, and the scanty, powdery character of the spray, like the fine dry grains of an unusually cold snow-storm. Directly before us, to the northward, the southern end of Church (or Antelope) Island rose from the lakeshaped like a lofty pair of pyramids, whose surface below the sky-line was broken into many smaller peaks of the same configuration, projecting from the main pyramids like the forms of a secondary crystallization. Those of our party who enjoyed reminiscences of the Mediterranean found much in Church

Island to remind them of Capri. Singularly enough, the Mormons report a cave in a bold precipice on the former's coast-line which may carry the distant relationship a step nearer by doing duty for a Blue Grotto. Certainly the most ravishing May-noon that ever shone on the Italian prototype never warmed its cliffs into a lovelier dream of color. At the distance of six miles from our stand-point, and seen through the screen of mellowing vapors which insensibly tinged the atmosphere above the lake, the whole vast mass of tufa, hornblende-rock, conglomerate, micaschist, talcose and other metamorphic slates, gneiss, and limestone, seemed soft as a sunset cloud in tone of both of feeling and color, or might have been taken for a luxurious bank of roses set adrift to sway lazily on the long swells of some hasheesh-eater's Lotos Bay. Directly behind us, to the height of ten or twelve hundred feet, rose several successive "benches" or terraced planes of elevation-conglomerate near the base, but limestone a little higher, the sides nearly or quite perpendicular, in many places even overhanging, and threatening at no distant day to follow the example and share the fate of the great masses of debris at their feet, varying in the comminution of their fragments from whole detached blocks as large as a moderately sized house to the finest dust, sometimes the accumulation of so long and undisturbed a period as entirely to obliterate the line of demarcation between the successive benches. Here and there, in the finer detritus, a stinted maple, a quaking aspen, or a dwarf willow, belonging to some one of the many species found in this region, had taken root; but with the exception of secluded spots sheltered from the direct force of sun and wind, the crags were

bare of any vegetation more ambitious than the artemisiaceæ and certain little lanigerous plants. Far up the face of one precipice we were pointed out the entrance to a remarkable cave. Accompanied by a couple of my friends, I had the recklessness to clamber up the slippery tablets and tottlish boulders which lay strewn upon the glacis of detritus intervening between us and the lofty hole, but lost all confidence in caverns when I discovered this particular one to be merely a shallow recess in the limestone, nowhere reëntrant to a distance of over forty feet, of the general proportions of a tin oven, and transacting an immense business of mystery (or what they call, as far west as this," Shenandigan" and "Scullduggery") with those who gape at it from below, on the capital of a dark, overgrown portal, as big as the cave itself. I could extemporize as good a cave anywhere in the country by knocking one side out of a medium-sized cow-stable. On reaching terra firma (a distinction unusually but properly applied, as any one who has ever broken his shins on one of those stones which gather no moss and show no remorse will testify) we had the further satisfaction of learning that we had not been to the right cave at all. The discoverer of the right cave, an orphan cowherd named Smith, who "ran" the Black Rock Ranch, in the absence of proprietors still keeping Fourth of July in that vortex of brilliant revelry, "the city," told us that he had explored it for about forty rods, and seemed to like it as far as he had gone, though his descriptive powers rather failed him when he was called on for particulars. The cave had no name, he said; so, after hesitating in view of a question whether it bettered the matter, we advised him to give it his own; but, with

the modesty of all great discoverers, he replied that this had never struck him. One or two of the party, who had not already broken their shins for the fraudulent cavern, set out under his guidance to visit Smith's Cave, but came back unsatisfied, having omitted to take candles. The locality is a very likely one for such lusus naturæ, or would be, were there more running water in the neighborhood to produce the phenomena of erosion. The rock in which Smith found his cave is a limestone, similar to that capping the conglomerate and metamorphic slates everywhere on the lofty benches about the lake basin; a favorite stratum for Nature's operations in the line of subterranean architecture, and, in the abundance of sulphur associated with it under various forms, showing a probability of sufficient gypsum for the extensive manufacture of stalactites. The limestone stratum is distinctly carboniferous, and affords numerous indications of the former existence of superimposed coalbeds, now destroyed by long exposure to the weather, or those volcanic agencies which have contributed heat to the metamorphose of the talcs, schists, gneiss, and other rocks in the vicinity still preserving their planes of stratification. In several portions of Utah -the valleys of Bear and Weber Rivers, of Silver and Sulphur Creeks — coal has been found; also on the Green (or Main Fork of the Colorado) River, and in the Little Salt Lake Valley. The latter coals are believed to be altogether bituminous; but none of them seem to belong, like those of the Platte and head-waters of the Arkansas, to the tertiary and cretaceous. I have mentioned in its place the coal which I examined on the Platte, not far from Denver, as belonging to a very recent period; retaining perfectly distinct