After dinner, as the sun was out brilliantly and the air bracing, we concluded to take a short stroll. Our snow-storm of the day before in the mountains had been only an affair of an inch or two here, and what had fallen was already fast disappearing. A walk of a square or two soon revealed the unique and wonderful beauty of this far-famed town. Its streets, eight rods wide with broad foot-walks, cross each other at right angles, and down each side course clear and rippling streams, fresh from the neighboring mountains. These spacious streets divide the city into squares or blocks of ten acres each, which are in turn subdivided into homestead lots of an acre and a quarter each, except in the heart of the city, where of course it is built up pretty solidly for several blocks. Standing back from the street in these goodly lots are their houses, built of frame or adobe, usually only one story high but sometimes two, and with as many doors ordinarily as the owner has wives. These were literally embowered in shrubbery and fruit trees, the grounds having been made wondrously fertile by irrigation, and as we walked along we could see the apple, peach, plum, pear, and apricot trees loaded down with their ripening fruit. The snow of the day before did not seem to have injured any of them materially, it was so unseasonable and soon gone. So, too, roses and flowers in rich profusion crowned the door-yards, while the gardens beyond seemed heaped with vegetables exquisite in their perfection and development. Lofty mountains, their snow-capped summits glittering in the sun-light, rimmed the valley in, whichever way you turned; while in the distance, tranquil as a sapphire, flashed the expanse of Great Salt Lake. To the traveller worn with stage-coaching, or weary from Bitter Creek, no wonder Salt Lake seems like Rasselas's Happy Valley, or Paradise Regained. Imagine to yourself a valley say fifty miles north and south, by thirty east and west, crowned above with snow-clad peaks, thick below with clustering farms, its interlacing streams flashing in the sun-light, with a fair city of fifteen or twenty thousand people gleaming in the midst, embowered in fruit and shade-trees, and you may form some conception of the prospect that greets you, as you rattle down the Wahsatch range, and out into the valley of Great Salt Lake. I doubt if there is a more picturesque or charming scene anywhere, not excepting the descent from the Alps into Italy. You involuntarily thank heaven, that "Bitter Creek" is over and past, and congratulate yourself on having struck civilization once more, Mormon though it be.