To my mind the most interesting relic in the whole collection was the spry octogenarian who acted as guide and showed us through the place--for he was one of the few living links between the Old West and the New. As a boy-convert to Mormonism he came across the desert with the second expedition that fled westward from Gentile persecution after Brigham Young had blazed the trail. He was a pony express rider in the days of the overland mail service. He was also an Indian fighter--one of the trophies he showed was a scalp of his own raising practically, he having been present when it was raised by a friendly Indian scout from the head of the hostile who originally owned it--and he had lived in Salt Lake City when it was a collection of log shanties within the walls of a wooden stockade. And now here he was, a man away up in his eighties, but still brisk and bright, piloting tourists about the upper floor of a modern skyscraper. We visited the museum after we had inspected the Mormon Tabernacle and had looked at the Mormon Temple--from the outside--and had seen the Beehive and the Lion House and the Eagle Gate and the painfully ornate mansion where Brigham Young kept his favorite wife, Amelia. The Tabernacle is famous the world over for its choir, its organ and its acoustics--particularly its acoustics. The guide, who is a Mormon elder detailed for that purpose, escorts you into the balcony, away up under the domed wooden roof; and as you wait there, listening, another elder, standing upon a platform two hundred feet away, drops an ordinary pin upon the floor--and you can distinctly hear it fall. At first you are puzzled to decide exactly what it sounds like; but after a while the correct solution comes to you--it sounds exactly like a pin falling. Next to the Whispering Gallery in the Capitol at Washington, I don't know of a worse place to tell your secrets to a friend than the Mormon Tabernacle. You might as well tell them to a woman and be done with it! In Salt Lake City I had rather counted upon seeing a Mormon out walking with three or four of his wives--all at one time. I felt that this would be a distinct novelty to a person from New York, where the only show one enjoys along this line is the sight of a chap walking with three or four other men's wives--one at a time. But here, as in my quest for the Indian, I was disappointed some more. Once I thought I was about to score. I was standing in front of the Zion Cooperative Mercantile Establishment, which is a big department store owned by the Church, but having all the latest improvements, including bargain counters and special salesdays. Out of the door came an elderly gentleman attired in much broadcloth and many whiskers, and behind him trailed half a dozen soberly dressed women of assorted ages. Filled with hope, I fell in behind the procession and followed it across to the hotel. There I learned the disappointing truth. The broadclothed person was not a Mormon at all.