the Boulevard to St. Denis was lined
with booths as for a _fete_, and the people feasted, sang, and danced
for joy that the tyrant was in his coffin. Time, the _galantuomo_, amply
avenged Fouquet.

* * * * *

AMONG THE MORMONS.

The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious
with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit
of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which
poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans
Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the
eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy
under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,--this stiff,
unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the
neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous
_canons_ through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the
Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.

We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but,
in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a
chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by
petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the
overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows,
lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at
Bridger's Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow
mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the
road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system
till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs
constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty
ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels
(metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of
the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I
believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side
and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little _plateau_ among snowy
ridges a few miles east of Bridger's Pass, the driver leans over and
tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that
they have reached the summit-level. Then, if you have a particle of true
cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something
indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in