THE MORMON TEMPLE.
At Ogden, where we were three hours late, our sleeper was taken off the through train to Cheyenne and attached to the express for Salt Lake City. We made no further stops, but, for an hour, whirled through a green, fruitful, patiently-tilled landscape, whose fertility and productiveness delighted eye and brain. Many orchards, large, comfortable farmsteads; wide meadows, green and abundant, as in Holland, with cattle and horses feeding upon them; stubble wheatfields, with flocks of sheep; great beet fields and kitchen gardens in full crops; and water—water in a thousand ditches everywhere! Big farm wagons, drawn by large, strong horses, we saw upon the highways; and farmers, in well-found vehicles, returning from the city to their homes.
Then, far away, towering above all else, loomed a group of gray spires, like the distant view of the dominating pinnacles of the minsters and cathedrals of England and of France, and of Cologne. They were the spires of the great towers of the Mormon temple, that strange, imposing and splendid creation of the brain of Brigham Young.
It was dusk when we reached the city. Electric lights were twinkling along the wide streets as we drove to our hotel. We have not yet seen the city, except for a short stroll under the glaring lights. But already it has made an indelible impression on our minds. Only two cities upon this continent—cities of magnitude—have ever been created and laid out, by systematic forethought, before being entered and occupied by men. One, Washington, laid out according to a comprehensive and well-digested plan; the other, Salt Lake City, the creation—as all else here—of Brigham Young.
The streets of Salt Lake City are all as wide as Pennsylvania Avenue. The blocks, of ten acres each, immense. But these streets—the chief ones are perfectly asphalted; running water flows in every side gutter; great trees, long ago planted, shade every wide sidewalk; the electric tram-cars run on tracks along the middle of the thoroughfare; and the two wide roadways, on either side, are quite free from interfering wires and poles. Many great blocks of fine buildings now rise along the business sections, and the stores present as sumptuous displays of goods and fabrics as anything we have seen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York. The town bears the marks of a great city. Great in its plan, great in its development, great in its destiny. Truly, a capital fit for the seat of power of the potent and comprehending Mormon church.
THE MORMON TITHING-HOUSE.