Miss Dividends: A NovelGunter, Archibald Clavering
General
Miss Dividends: A Novel
Gunter, Archibald Clavering
Latter Day Saints -- Fiction
In these streets there is a curious, heterogeneous life, the like of
which she has never seen before. Immediately below her, in front of the
hotel, men of many climes lounge about the unpaved sidewalk, most of
them seated, their feet against the trees that line its side, each man
smoking a cigar, the aromas of which, as they float up to her, seem to
be pleasant.
Most of these are mining speculators from California, the East, and
Europe; as their voices rise to her, she catches tones similar to those
she has heard in Delmonico's from travelling Englishmen. For the Emma
mine is in its glory; and much British capital has floated into this
Territory, to be invested in the silver leads of the great mountains
that cut off her view to the east, and the low ranges that she can see
to the south and west; a good deal of it never to return to London
again; for, of all the speculators of many nations who have invested in
American securities, stocks, bonds, mining properties and beer
interests, none have so rashly and so lavishly squandered their money as
the speculators of merry England. These have sometimes been allured to
financial discomfort by Yankee shrewdness, but more often have been
betrayed by the ignorance or carelessness or rascality of those whom
they have sent from their native isle to represent them, who have judged
America, Western mines and Yankee business methods by England, Cornish
lodes and the financial conditions that prevail in Thread-Needle Street.
Two or three hacks and carriages, such as are seen in the East, stand in
front of the hotel, while in the street before her move some big mule
teams, laden with bars of lead and silver, from some smelter on the
Jordan, and a little further on is a wagon of the prairies, covered with
the mud and dust of long travel, driven by some Mormon who has come up
from the far southern settlements of Manti, or Parowan, or the pretty
oasis towns of Payson or Spanish Fork or some other garden spot by the
side of the fresh waters of Utah Lake, to go through the rites of the
Endowment House, and take unto himself another wife; paying well for the
ceremonies in farm produce.
Looking over this scene, the girl murmurs, "How peaceful--how
beautiful!" and next, "How wonderful," and a moment after, gazing at the
great Mormon Tabernacle, she mutters, "How awful!" for in the two hours
passed upon the train coming from Ogden to Salt Lake, Harry Lawrence has
told her, as delicately as a young man can tell a maiden, of this
peculiar city into which she has just come, and she knows quite well the
peculiar creed of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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