Traveling alone so much has made me feel very friendly toward the lower animals. I have been as much inclined to stop and talk to a horse or a little pig as to a person, and many times I longed to have the different ones wait till I could get hold of and caress them. The farther I travel the more this feeling grows on me, but there is still one animal that I have not yet learned to love or to want to squeeze, and that is a rattlesnake. But I can see I am growing in grace in that respect also. Now, when I see a snake, I don't run and jump on it, as I used to at home. The defenseless condition of my legs may have had something to do with this change of heart, but really they are the only living things that have annoyed me, thus far. At Echo we found we were as near Salt Lake City as we should be at Ogden, forty miles further along on the line of the Union Pacific, so we started in a southerly direction over excellent roads, up the beautiful Weber Valley, and were soon eating supper at a comfortable farm-house, where everything was as homelike and pleasant as in any New England home. Desiring information, I said: "I wonder if any of those people in large canvas covered wagons we have been meeting are Mormons?" "O, yes," the farmer's wife replied quickly, "there are lots of them around here. They go out on fishing excursions this time of the year a great deal. What do you Eastern people think of the Mormons, anyway? Do you think we have horns?" You can imagine my surprise, but the farmer and his wife, too, joined in and talked so freely and pleasantly on the subject that I soon asked questions as freely as they answered them. "Yes," the farmer said, "I have been married twenty-three years and have never had more than the one wife. I may sometime take another, but I don't see my way clear to do so yet. A few Mormons around here have more than one wife, but the elections show that only one in eight throughout the whole territory are polygamists. The church does not oblige us to take more than one wife any more than it does to pay one-tenth of what we raise at tilling, and there are lots of Mormons who never do either, but if we do our whole duty we should do both. It is not enough for the Government to oblige us to give up wives we have loved and had children by, but now they are trying to pass a law to disfranchise us if we will not swear we will give up our religion. Juries are packed and we are convicted without justice. We never will give up our religion. We must submit for a while, but the time will come when we shall be delivered from our persecutors." This and much more was said, and it all gave me the impression that if only one-eighth of the Mormons were polygamists, the extent of the blot upon the good name of the country had been greatly over-estimated, for these people were really as kind and Christ-like as any I have met in my travels. But this was one side of the question.