FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD.

Scandinavian Mormons—Danish ol—Among the Orchards at Manti—On the way to Conference—Adam and Eve—The protoplasm of a settlement—Ham and eggs—At Mayfield—Our teamster's theory of the ground-hog—On the way to Glenwood—Volcanic phenomena and lizards—A suggestion for improving upon Nature—Primitive Art

"MY hosts at Manti were Danes, and the wife brewed Danish ol." Such is the entry in my note-book, made, I remember, to remind me to say that the San Pete settlements are composed in great proportion of Danes and Scandinavians. These nationalities contribute more largely than any other—unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation—to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously than any others. The Americans, Welsh, Scotch, English, Germans, and Swiss, merge very rapidly into one blend, but the Scandinavian type—and a very fine peasant type it is—is clearly marked in the settlements where the Hansens and the Jansens, Petersens, Christiansens, Nielsens, and Sorensens, most do congregate. By the way, some of these Norse names sound very curiously to the ear. "Ole Hagg" might be thought to be a nickname rather than anything else, and Lars Nasquist Brihl at best a joke. Their children are remarkably pretty, and the women models of thriftiness.

My hostess at Manti was a pattern. She made pies under an inspiration, and her chicken-pie was a distinct revelation. Her "beer" was certainly a beverage that a man might deny himself quite cheerfully, but to eat her preserves was like listening to beautiful parables, and her cream cheese gave the same gentle pleasure as the singing of thankful canticles.

In the garden was an arbour overrun with a wild grapevine, and I took my pen and ink in there to write. All went well for a while. An amiable cat came and joined me, sitting in a comfortable cushion-sort of fashion on the corner of my blotting-pad. But while we sat there writing, the cat and I, there came a humming-bird into the arbour—a little miracle in feathers, with wings all emeralds and a throat of ruby. And it sat in the sunlight on a vine-twig that straggled out across the door, and began to preen its tiny feathers. I stopped writing to watch the beautiful thing. And so did the cat. For happening to look down at the table I saw the cat, with a fiendish expression of face and her eyes intent on the bird, gathering her hind legs together for a spring. To give the cat a smack on the head, and for the cat to vanish with an explosion of ill-temper, "was the work of an instant." The humming-bird flashed out into the garden, and I was left alone to mop up the ink which the startled cat had spilt. Then I went out and wandered across the garden, where English flowers, the sweet-william and columbine, pinks and wallflowers, pansies and iris, were growing, under the fruit-trees still bunched with blossoms, and out into the street. Friends asked me if I wasn't going to "the conference," but I had not the heart to go inside when the world out of doors was so inviting. There was a cool, green tint in the shade of the orchards, pleasant with the voices of birds and dreamy with the humming of bees. There was nobody else about, only children making posies of apple-blossoms and launching blue boats of iris-petals on the little roadside streams. Everybody was "at conference," and those that could not get into the building were grouped outside among the waggons of the country folk who had come from a distance. These conferences are held quarterly (so that the lives of the Apostles who preside at them are virtually spent in travelling) and at them everything is discussed, whether of spiritual or temporal interest and a general balance struck, financially and religiously. In character they resemble the ordinary meetings of the Mormons, being of exactly the same curious admixture of present farming and future salvation, business advice and pious exhortation.

Everybody who can do so, attends these meetings; and they fulfil, therefore, all the purposes of the Oriental mela. Farmers, stock-raisers, and dealers generally, meet from a distance and talk over business matters, open negotiations and settle bargains, exchange opinions and discuss prospects. Their wives and families, such of them as can get away from their homes, foregather and exchange their domestic news, while everybody lays in a fresh supply of spiritual refreshment for the coming three months, and hears the latest word of the Church as to the Edmunds Bill and Gentile tradesmen. The scene is as primitive and quaint as can be imagined, for in rural Utah life is still rough and hearty and simple. To the stranger, the greetings of family groups, with the strange flavour of the Commonwealth days, the wonderful Scriptural or apocryphal names, and the old-fashioned salutation, are full of picturesque interest, while the meetings of waggons filled with acquaintances from remote corners of the country, the confusion of European dialects—imagine hearing pure Welsh among the San Pete sagebrush!—the unconventional cordiality of greeting, are delightful both in an intellectual and artistic sense.

I have travelled much, and these social touches have always had a charm for me, let them be the demure reunions of Creoles sous les filaos in Mauritius; or the French negroes chattering as they go to the baths in Bourbon; the deep-drinking convivialities of the Planters' Club in Ceylon; the grinning, prancing, rencontres of Kaffir and Kaffir, or the stolid collision of Boer waggons on the African veldt; the stately meeting of camel-riding Beluchis on the sandy put of Khelat; the jingling ox-drawn ekkas foregathered to "bukh" under the tamarind-trees of Bengal; the reserved salutations of Hindoos as they squat by the roadside to discuss the invariable lawsuit and smoke the inevitable hubble-bubble; the noisy congregation of Somali boatmen before their huts on the sun-smitten shores of Aden;—what a number of reminiscences I could string together of social traits in various parts of the world! And these Mormon peasants, pioneers of the West, these hardy sons of hardy sires, will be as interesting to me in the future as any others, and my remembrance of them will be one of admiration for their unfashionable virtues of industry and temperance, and of gratitude for their simple courtesy and their cordial hospitality.

As we left Manti behind us, the waggons "coming into conference" got fewer and fewer, and soon we found ourselves out alone upon the broad levels of the valley, with nothing to keep us company but a low range of barren hills that did their best to break the monotony of the landscape. In places, the ground was white with desperate patches of "saleratus," the saline efflorescence with which agriculture in this Territory is for ever at war, and resembling in appearance, taste, and effects the "reh" of the Gangetic plains. Here, as in India, irrigation is the only known antidote, and once wash it out of the soil and get crops growing and the enemy retires. But as soon as cultivation ceases or irrigation slackens, the white infection creeps over the ground again, and if undisturbed for a year resumes possession. How unrelenting Nature is in her conflict with man!

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."

I like the phrase "fit to tear up," and wonder when, in the opinion of this frugal people, anything does become suitable for destruction. But it is hardly destruction after all to turn old clothes into carpets, and the process is as simple as, in fact is identical with, ordinary hand-weaving. The cloth is simply shredded into very narrow strips, and each strip is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary yarn, the result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs are also made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by drawing very narrow shreds of rag through the spaces of the canvas, fastening them on the reverse side, and cutting them off to a uniform "pile" on the upper. In one cottage at Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which the girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours with a distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An industrial exhibition for such products would, I have no doubt, bring to light a great many out-of-the-way handicrafts which these emigrant people have brought with them from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try to adorn their simple homes.

Our teamster from Mayfield to Glenwood, the next stage of my southward journey, was a very cautious person. He would not hurry his horses down hill—they were "belike" to stumble; and he would not hurry them up hill—it "fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped altogether, to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually that they were plough horses. I suspected it from the first. And from his driving I suspected that he was the ploughman. In other respects he was a very desirable teamster.

His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago himself) were very entertaining, and his theory of "ground hogs" would have delighted Darwin. As far as I could follow him, all animals were of one species, the differences as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or sex. This, at any rate, was my induction from his description of the "ground hog," which he said was a "kind of squirrel—like the prairie dog!" As he said, there were "quite a few" ground hogs, but they moved too fast among the brush for me to identify them. As far as I could tell, though, they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long, with very short tails and round small ears. When they were at a safe distance they would stand up at full length on their hind legs, the colouring underneath being lighter than on the back. What are they? I have seen none in Utah except on these volcanic stretches of country between Salina and Monroe.

Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge mounds of scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some gigantic furnace, are piled up in the centre of the level ground, while in other places circular depressions in the soil—sometimes fifty feet in diameter and lowest in the centre, with deep fissures defining the circumference—seem to mark the places whence the scoriae had been drawn, and the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted.

The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking contrast. On this, the eastern, was desolation and stone heaps and burnt-up spaces with ant-hills and lizards.

Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as an abundance of lizards. They are associated in memory with dead, still heat, "the intolerable calor of Mambre," the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call Aden, the stifling hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering in the autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria—what millions of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little salamanders, used to bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they lay at full length among the sand!—the heat-cracked fields of India. I know very well that there are lizards and lizards; that they might be divided—as the Hindoo divides everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines or the fates the gods send him—into "hot" and "cold" lizards. The salamander itself, according to the ancients, was icy cold. But this does not matter. All lizards make places look hot.

On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground of "Mr. Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies Aurora, a settlement in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat soil with frequent growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or bull-berry or red-berry or "kichi-michi") marking the course of the Sevier.

But our road soon wound down by a "dug way" to the bottom-lands, and we found ourselves on level meadows clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields, and among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses. Overhead circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting reminder to the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these Campanian pastures, that Scythian Piutes and Navajo Attilas might at any time swoop down upon them.

But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and mutton is inexplicable—and most inexplicable of all in the case of lamb, seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very pleasing illustration of the happiness of results when man and nature work cordially together. The lamb gambols about among beds of mint! What a becoming sense of the fitness of things that would be that should surprise the innocent thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together! "They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided." And what a delightful field for similar efforts such a spectacle opens up to the philosophic mind! Here, beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the brakes of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. And not a pea in the neighbourhood! Now, why not sow green peas along the banks of the American rivers and lakes? How soothing to the weary traveller would be this occasional relief of canard aux petits pois!

After an interval of pretty river scenery we found ourselves once more in a dismal, volcanic country with bald hills and leprous sand-patches the only features of the landscape, with lizards for flowers and an exasperating heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of everything with its quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles of this, we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains, some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into splendid architectural designs of almost inconceivable variety, richly tinted and fantastically grouped. How wealthy this range must be in mineral! In front of us, above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once upon the village of Glenwood—a beautiful cluster of foliage with skirts of meadow-land spread out all about it—lying at the foot of the huge slope.

Near Glenwood is an interesting little lake that I visited. Its water is exquisitely clear and very slightly warm. Though less than a foot deep in most places (it has one pool twelve feet in depth), it never freezes, in spite of the intense cold at this altitude. It is stocked with trout that do not grow to any size, but which do not on the other hand seem to diminish in numbers, although the consumption is considerable. The botany in the neighbourhood of the lake is very interesting, the larkspur, lupin, mimulus, violet, heart's-ease, ox-eye, and several other familiar plants of English gardens, growing wild, while a strongly tropical flavour is given to the vegetation by the superb footstools of cactus—imagine sixty-one brilliant scarlet blossoms on a cushion only fifteen inches across!—by the presence of a gorgeous oriole (the body a pure yellow freaked with black on the wings, and the head and neck a rich orange), and by a large butterfly of a clear flame-colour with the upper wings sharply hooked at the tips. Flower, bird, and insect were all in keeping with the Brazils or the Malayan Archipelago.

On a rock, close by the grist-mill, is the only specimen of the much-talked-of Indian "hieroglyphics" that I have seen. They may of course be hieroglyphics, but to me they look like the first attempts of some untutored savage youth to delineate in straight lines the human form divine. Or they may be only his attempts to delineate a cockroach.