re marked. This was by far the most exciting
and effective wave excursion I ever made this side of the Rocky
Mountains; and when at its close I was heaved ashore among the sunny
grasses and flowers, I found myself a new creature indeed, and went
bounding along the beach with blood all aglow, reinforced by the best
salts of the mountains, and ready for any race.

Since the completion of the transcontinental and Utah railways, this
magnificent lake in the heart of the continent has become as accessible
as any watering-place on either coast; and I am sure that thousands of
travelers, sick and well, would throng its shores every summer were its
merits but half known. Lake Point is only an hour or two from the city,
and has hotel accommodations and a steamboat for excursions; and then,
besides the bracing waters, the climate is delightful. The mountains
rise into the cool sky furrowed with canyons almost yosemitic in
grandeur, and filled with a glorious profusion of flowers and trees.
Lovers of science, lovers of wildness, lovers of pure rest will find
here more than they may hope for.

As for the Mormons one meets, however their doctrines be regarded, they
will be found as rich in human kindness as any people in all our broad
land, while the dark memories that cloud their earlier history will
vanish from the mind as completely as when we bathe in the fountain
azure of the Sierra.

IX. Mormon Lilies [11]

Lilies are rare in Utah; so also are their companions the ferns and
orchids, chiefly on account of the fiery saltness of the soil and
climate. You may walk the deserts of the Great Basin in the bloom time
of the year, all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the snowy
Wahsatch, and your eyes will be filled with many a gay malva, and poppy,
and abronia, and cactus, but you may not see a single true lily, and
only a very few liliaceous plants of any kind. Not even in the cool,
fresh glens of the mountains will you find these favorite flowers,
though some of these desert ranges almost rival the Sierra in height.
Nevertheless, in the building and planting of this grand Territory the
lilies were not forgotten. Far back in the dim geologic ages, when the
sediments of the old seas were being gathered and outspread in smooth
sheets like leaves of a book, and when these sediments became dry land,
and were baked and crumbled into the sky as mountain ranges; when the
lava-floods of the Fire Period were being lavishly po