"Great Salt Lake" is, of course, the Utah Lake of the outside world. But "Utah Lake" proper, is the large sheet of fresh water which lies some thirty miles south of Salt Lake City, and gives its name to the valley which it helps to fertilize. All around it, except on the western shore, the Mormons have planted their villages, so that from Lehi you can look out on to the valley, and see at the feet of the encircling hills, and straggling down towards the lake, a semicircle of settlements that, but for the sterility of the mountain slopes on the west, might have formed a complete ring around it. But no springs rise on the western slopes, and the settlements of the valleys always lie, therefore, on the eastern side, unless some central stream gives facilities for irrigation on the western also. Utah Lake is a lake of legends. In the old Indian days it was held in superstitious reverence as the abode of the wind spirits and the storm spirits, and as being haunted by monsters of weird kind and great size. Particular spots were too uncanny for the red men to pitch their lodges there; and even game had asylum, as in a city of refuge, if it chanced to run in the direction of the haunted shore. In later times, too, the Utah Lake has borne an uncomfortable reputation as the domain of strange water-apparitions, and several men have recorded visions of aquatic monsters, for which science as yet has found no name, but which, speaking roughly, appear to have been imitations of that delightful possibility, the sea serpent. Science, I know, goes dead against such gigantic worms, but this wonderful Western country has astonishment in store for the scientific world. If half I am told about the wondrous fossils of Arizona and thereabouts be true, it may even be within American resources to produce the kraken himself. In the mean time, as a contribution towards it, and a very tolerable instalment, too, I would commend to notice the great snake of the Utah Lake. It has frightened men--and, far better evidence than that, it has been seen by children when playing on the shore. I say "better," because children are not likely to invent a plausible horror in order to explain their sudden rushing away from a given spot with terrified countenances and a consistent narrative--a horror, too, which should coincide with the snake superstitions of the Pi-Ute Indians. Have wise men from the East ever heard of this fabled thing? Does the Smithsonian know of this terror of the lake--this freshwater kraken--this new Mormon iniquity?