Salt Lake City, Utah, April 6, 1891.

On the last Sunday of last September I was one among the five thousand people who enjoyed the masterly eloquence of Spurgeon at his Tabernacle in London; to-day, Monday, I was in the Mormon Tabernacle, where a conference was being held, and in which were gathered as many people as the great building would hold,—seated and standing, twelve thousand.

Several Mormon elders held forth, but what they said did not particularly interest me. It was, for the most part, a defense of their form of “religion,” and they claimed they had a right, in this free country, to teach and practice their peculiar doctrine.

The acoustic properties of this great edifice are excellent; I tested them in different parts of the house, and heard almost every word that was said by the several speakers. Each spoke but for a short time, ten or fifteen minutes.

The most interesting part of Monday’s “session” to my mind was the musical part, a chorus of two hundred and fifty male and female voices singing to the rich and powerful tones of what is claimed to be the largest organ but one in the world.

A strange feature of the assemblage was the great number of young children and babes in arms; the crowd of baby carriages in the halls and entrances being very noticeable.

The exterior of the Tabernacle, from its oval shape, is often likened to half an egg bisected lengthwise; to me it looks like a tortoise, with its low curved roof and its remarkably short pillars, only a few feet apart.

But it is a mammoth tortoise, 250 × 150 feet, with not a column nor a pillar to obstruct the view—the largest span of unsupported wooden roof in the world.

The Temple in Salt Lake City, the corner-stone of which was laid on the twelfth of April, 1853, is, like the municipal buildings in Philadelphia, the City Hall in San Francisco and the Cathedral in Cologne, still unfinished, although $3,500,000 has been expended in its construction so far. The Temple’s dimensions are 200 × 100 feet.

It is built entirely of granite. The towers are beautiful. When completed they will be 200 feet high. A marble slab 12 × 3 feet is inserted in the centre tower. Upon that slab appears this inscription in gold letters:

“Holiness to the Lord, the house of the Lord. Built by the Church of Jesus Christ, of latter-day saints. Commenced April 6, 1853. Completed”—space is left under the word “completed” in which to insert the date, but that space may not be filled during the next quarter of a century.

The first blocks of granite for the building were hauled from the quarries, a distance of twenty miles, by oxen, but for many years past the granite has been brought to the city by a railroad planned originally by Mormons.

Salt Lake, on account of its unpaved streets, must be miserable as a place of residence. In wet weather the mud in the streets is from six inches to two feet deep, and in dry weather the dust is intolerable. It is probably not quite so bad in these respects as Key West, Florida, but it is always disagreeable enough. Yet the city is well laid out; all the streets are over one hundred feet wide; there is a good system of electric street-cars, and there are many fine granite and brick business blocks. Salt Lake has an evident air of prosperity. Its population has more than doubled in the past ten years. In 1880 it was 20,000; in 1890 45,000.

Brigham street, the Fifth avenue of Salt Lake, contains not a few private residences of which any city might be proud.

The leading hotel is “The Templeton,” owned by a company of which D. C. Young is president. The manager of the hotel is Alonzo Young. The president and the manager are both sons of Brigham Young, but are half brothers only. Brigham sleeps with a couple of his wives in a cemetery a few hundred feet from the hotel.

The Templeton is new and substantial, but it was not erected for a hotel, and it lacks some conveniences which you expect to find. It is better adapted for an office building, which was its original purpose.

The dining-room is on the top floor, as is the dining-room of the Auditorium in Chicago, and the Vendome in New York, and as is the kitchen of the Windsor Hotel in London.

From this room in the Templeton, if you secure a choice seat, you get most magnificent views. You are surrounded by snow-covered mountains, and to the west you see the principal buildings of the city—the Mormon Tabernacle, the Temple and the Assembly Hall, all enclosed and fenced within a ten-acre lot.

We were unfortunate in the time of our visit to Salt Lake. The city was crowded on account of the Mormon conference and all the hotels were full. At the Templeton they had an insufficient number of waiters and they served saucers of ice cream on warm plates.

But perhaps we are hypercritical in our notes on the shortcomings of hotels in Salt Lake; some allowance must be made for the fact that we had just come from a week at “The California”—that new and beautiful hotel in San Francisco which is kept by A. F. Kinzler, the comforts and elegancies of which, fresh in our memory and with their flavor, so to speak, still lingering on our palate, had for the time spoiled us for less perfect accommodations and an inferior style of living.

I had occasion to look at the city directory of Salt Lake and in turning over the leaves I noticed that there are living no less than nine widows of the lamented apostle of Mormonism, Brigham Young.