aps of as much misery as has ever been
compressed into forty years. The good folk at home will not understand,
but you will, what follows. You know how in Bengal to this day the
child-wife is taught to curse her possible co-wife, ere yet she has gone
to her husband's house? And the Bengali woman has been accustomed to
polygamy for a few hundred years. You know, too, the awful jealousy
between mother wife and barren behind the purdah--the jealousy that
culminates sometimes in the poisoning of the well-beloved son? Now and
again, an Englishwoman employs a high-caste Mussulman nurse, and in the
offices of that hire women are apt to forget the differences of colour,
and to speak unreservedly as twin daughters under Eve's curse. The nurse
tells very strange and awful things. She has, and this the Mormons count
a privilege, been born into polygamy; but she loathes and detests it
from the bottom of her jealous soul. And to the lot of the Bengali
co-wife--"the cursed of the cursed--the daughter of the dunghill--the
scald-head and the barren-mute" (you know the rest of that sweet
commination-service)--one creed, of all the White creeds to-day,
deliberately introduces the white woman taken from centuries of
training, which have taught her that it is right to control the
undivided heart of one man. To quench her most natural rebellion, that
amazing creed and fantastic jumble of Mahometanism, the Mosaical law,
and imperfectly comprehended fragments of Freemasonry, calls to its aid
all the powers of a hell conceived and elaborated by coarse-minded
hedgers and ditchers. A sweet view, isn't it?

All the beauty of the valley could not make me forget it. But the valley
is very fair. Bench after bench of land, flat as a table against the
flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt Lake rested for a
while as it sunk from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and
thirty broad. Before long the benches will be covered with houses. At
present these are hidden among the green trees on the dead flat of the
valley. You have read a hundred times how the streets of Salt Lake City
are very broad, furnished with rows of shade trees and gutters of fresh
water. This is true, but I struck the town in a season of great
drouth--that same drouth which is playing havoc with the herds of
Montana. The trees were limp, and the rills of sparkling water that one
reads about were represented by dusty, paved courses. Main Street
appears to be inhabited b