ere,
I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search,
that I had not met a single woman who looked high-toned, first-class,
capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion,--not a single
woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study,--not one
to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for
companionship in his pursuits or sympathy in his yearnings. Because I
knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a "Just as you
might have expected!" I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot
that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.

I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men
besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and
the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (_proximus longo
intervallo!_) Brigham's most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the
next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent
the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive
Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his
antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic
rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red
of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes
and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament
fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even
without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse
and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them. Men,
everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness
in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel
that we were insulting the lowest member of the _demi-monde_, if we
uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the
habitual staple of all Heber Kimball's public sermons to the wives and
daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.

Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt's and my own eternal welfare.
He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at
breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff
vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look
like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have
heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a
long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these
p