Till I had seen the editors’ rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be carried. For all these hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor‘s vanity to be “liquored” by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the governor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or twice in a month. It must not be supposed that the _Vedette_ does the Mormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power. The three lines that are invariably taken as foundations for their stories are these--that the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain get away, but are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism--or, as the _Vedette_ puts it, “on tithing and loaning hang all the law and the profits.” If the mere fact of the existence of the _Vedette_ effectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California herself cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country “Deseret”--“land of the bee.” The process of fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was carried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are springing up on every side, and “Dixie” begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle, _we_ say, though the Saints undoubtedly believe that God‘s hand is in it, helping miraculously “His peculiar people.” In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.