We passed some warm springs a few miles from Manti, but the water though slightly saline is inodorous, and on the patches which they water I saw the wild flax growing as if it enjoyed the temperature and the soil. Then Six-Mile Creek, a pleasant little ravine, crossed by a rustic bridge, which gives water for a large tract Of land, and so to Sterling, a settlement as yet in its cradle, and curiously illustrative of "the beginning of things" in rural Utah. One man and his one wife up on the hillside doing something to the water, one cock and one hen pecking together in monogamous sympathy, one dog sitting at the door of a one-roomed log-hut. Everything was in the Adam and Eve stage of society, and primeval. So Deucalion and Pyrrha had the earth to themselves, and the "rooster" stalked before his mate as if he was the first inventor of posterity. But much of this country is going to come under the plough in time, for there is water, and in the meantime, as giving promise of a future with some children in it, there is a school-house—an instance of forethought which gratified me.
The country now becomes undulating, remaining for the most part a sterile-looking waste of grease-wood, but having an almost continuous thread of cultivation running along the centre of the valley which, a few miles further on, suddenly widens into a great field of several thousand acres. On the other side of it we found Mayfield.
In Mayfield every one was gone to the Conference except a pretty girl, left to look after all the children of the village, and who resisted our entreaties for hospitality with a determination that would have been more becoming in an uglier person—and an old lady, left under the protection of a big blind dog and a little bobtailed calf. She received us with the honest courtesy universal in the Territory, showed us where to put our horses and where the lucerne was stacked, and apologized to us for having nothing better than eggs and ham to offer!
Fancy nothing better than eggs and ham! To my mind there is nothing in all travelling so delightful as these eggs-and-ham interruptions that do duty for meals. Not only is the viand itself so agreeable, but its odour when cooking creates an appetite.
What a moral there is here! We have all heard of the beauty of the lesson that those flowers teach us which give forth their sweetest fragrance when crushed. But I think the conduct of eggs and ham, that thus create an appetite in order to increase man's pleasure in their own consumption, is attended with circumstances of good taste that are unusually pleasing.
In our hostess's house at Mayfield I saw for the first time the ordinary floor-covering of the country through which we subsequently travelled—a "rag-carpet." It is probably common all over the world, but it was quite new to me. I discussed its composition one day with a mother and her daughter.
"This streak here is Jimmy's old pants, and that darker one is a military overcoat. This is daddy's plush vest. This bit of the pattern is—"
"No, mother, that's your old jacket-back; don't you remember?"—and so on all through the carpet.
Every stripe in it had an association, and the story of the whole was pretty nearly the story of their entire lives in the country.
"For it took us seven years to get together just this one strip of carpet. We folks haven't much, you see, that's fit to tear up."