as they unfold. I heard Brigham Young in the
Tabernacle the other day warning his people that if they did not mend
their manners angels would not come into their houses, though perchance
they might be sauntering by with little else to do than chat with them.
Possibly there may be Salt Lake families sufficiently pure for angel
society, but I was not pleased with the reception they gave the small
snow angels that God sent among them the other night. Only the children
hailed them with delight. The old Latter-Days seemed to shun them. I
should like to see how Mr. Young, the Lake Prophet, would meet such
messengers.
But to return to the storm. Toward the evening of the 18th it began to
wither. The snowy skirts of the Wahsatch Mountains appeared beneath the
lifting fringes of the clouds, and the sun shone out through colored
windows, producing one of the most glorious after-storm effects I ever
witnessed. Looking across the Jordan, the gray sagey slopes from the
base of the Oquirrh Mountains were covered with a thick, plushy cloth of
gold, soft and ethereal as a cloud, not merely tinted and gilded like a
rock with autumn sunshine, but deeply muffled beyond recognition. Surely
nothing in heaven, nor any mansion of the Lord in all his worlds, could
be more gloriously carpeted. Other portions of the plain were flushed
with red and purple, and all the mountains and the clouds above them
were painted in corresponding loveliness. Earth and sky, round and round
the entire landscape, was one ravishing revelation of color, infinitely
varied and interblended.
I have seen many a glorious sunset beneath lifting storm clouds on the
mountains, but nothing comparable with this. I felt as if new-arrived in
some other far-off world. The mountains, the plains, the sky, all seemed
new. Other experiences seemed but to have prepared me for this, as souls
are prepared for heaven. To describe the colors on a single mountain
would, if it were possible at all, require many a volume--purples, and
yellows, and delicious pearly grays divinely toned and interblended,
and so richly put on one seemed to be looking down through the ground
as through a sky. The disbanding clouds lingered lovingly about the
mountains, filling the canyons like tinted wool, rising and drooping
around the topmost peaks, fondling their rugged bases, or, sailing
alongside, trailed their lustrous fringes through the pines as if taking
a last view of their accomplished work. Then
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