Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all
the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that
the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants
Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years,--the
more sanguine said, "next summer."

At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the
orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts? My
gentlemen-readers will feel highly nattered by a solution of this
problem which I received from no leaser light of the Latter-Day Church
than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.

"Why," said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly
Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, "isn't
the Lord Almighty providin' for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He
anyways kin? This war's a-goin' on till the biggest part o' you male
Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that's left
and comes a-fleein' t' our asylum 'll bring all the women o' the nation
along with 'em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on 'em
all they want, and hev a large balance left over to distribute round
among God's saints that hez been here from the beginnin' o' the
tribulation."

The sweet taste which this diabolical reflection seemed to leave in
Heber Kimball's mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had
ever felt regarding either saint or sinner. But it is costly to smite an
apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by
telling him I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture-room full of
Sanitary-Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands,
sweethearts, and brothers in the Union army. I didn't know whether
saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who'd get scraped a
little.

To resume Brigham for the last time. After a conversation about the
Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Government,
averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go
farther to protect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre
than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on
every war-question, and tactfully changed the subject to the beauty of
the Opera-House.

As to the Indians, let me remark by-the-by, I did not tell him that I
understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that
direction. Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Goshoots, Pi-Utes,