in the walls
of a wooden stockade. And now here he was, a man away up in his
eighties, but still brisk and bright, piloting tourists about the upper
floor of a modern skyscraper.

We visited the museum after we had inspected the Mormon Tabernacle and
had looked at the Mormon Temple--from the outside--and had seen the
Beehive and the Lion House and the Eagle Gate and the painfully ornate
mansion where Brigham Young kept his favorite wife, Amelia. The
Tabernacle is famous the world over for its choir, its organ and its
acoustics--particularly its acoustics. The guide, who is a Mormon elder
detailed for that purpose, escorts you into the balcony, away up under
the domed wooden roof; and as you wait there, listening, another elder,
standing upon a platform two hundred feet away, drops an ordinary pin
upon the floor--and you can distinctly hear it fall. At first you are
puzzled to decide exactly what it sounds like; but after a while the
correct solution comes to you--it sounds exactly like a pin falling.
Next to the Whispering Gallery in the Capitol at Washington, I don't
know of a worse place to tell your secrets to a friend than the Mormon
Tabernacle. You might as well tell them to a woman and be done with it!

In Salt Lake City I had rather counted upon seeing a Mormon out walking
with three or four of his wives--all at one time. I felt that this would
be a distinct novelty to a person from New York, where the only show
one enjoys along this line is the sight of a chap walking with three or
four other men's wives--one at a time. But here, as in my quest for the
Indian, I was disappointed some more. Once I thought I was about to
score. I was standing in front of the Zion Cooperative Mercantile
Establishment, which is a big department store owned by the Church, but
having all the latest improvements, including bargain counters and
special salesdays. Out of the door came an elderly gentleman attired in
much broadcloth and many whiskers, and behind him trailed half a dozen
soberly dressed women of assorted ages.

Filled with hope, I fell in behind the procession and followed it across
to the hotel. There I learned the disappointing truth. The broadclothed
person was not a Mormon at all.

He was a country bank president from somewhere back East and the women
of his party were Ohio school-teachers. Anywhere except in Utah I doubt
if he could have fooled me, either, for he had the kind of whiskers
that go with the banking p