—In a recent lecture at San Francisco, Anna Dickinson gives her first impressions of Salt Lake City, as follows :
It was at the close of a lovely day in June—one of those grand evenings on the Plains—that I saw them stretching their golden ex-panse away as far as the eye could reach, and saw that sapphire sea reflecting the sapphire sky above, and away off from the city, those grand mountains with the ever-gleaming, bril-liant snow shining above them all; amid all this glowing scene lay the plague spot, Salt Lake City—a foul blot on nature's face, a whitened sepulchre without; and within, what? A beautiful town, indeed, it is, with its broad, cool, clean streets; with its little streams of water in all their mountain fresh-ness and icy coldness, so pure and clear that, paradoxical as it may seem to you, one can stoop down and get a most refreshing drink of the purest water from the gutter itself. With its picturesque scenery, its beautiful buildings, its little adobe huts and all, it is a beautiful city in the desert, a lovely and pleasant spot to come and feast one's eyes with after a journey across the arid wastes. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said the Master of old, and by its fruits ye shall know Mormonism, and whether what you see at Salt Lake City is any better or any worse than what is to be seen any day in San Francisco or New York. True, in Salt Lake there is no noise, no drunken-ness, no gambling, no riots, but order and qui-et day and night. There are no churches save one, and what a one is that. The children you see playing in the streets are debased, wretched, unhealthy-looking, bearing in their countenances the impress of the most brutal passions of men.
