Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made personal experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing sobriety of these people. I put them repeatedly to the severest test that you can apply to a hospitable man, by asking point-blank for ardent spirits. Sometimes, in an off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a lad, and ask him to "run across to the store and get me a little whisky or brandy." He would take both and meander round in an aimless sort of way. But I might almost as well have asked him to go and buy me a few birds-of-paradise or advance sheets of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a "likely" place to get some stimulant, but, as a rule, the quest was unconditionally abandoned as hopeless. The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, discouraging, by their own abstinence, indulgence even in tea and coffee. You are asked in a settlement whether you will have tea or coffee, just as in England you would be asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A strong man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a glass of sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. Being a Londoner, I entertain a most wholesome suspicion of water as a drink, and I reverence fresh milk. In rural Utah, milk being so abundant, the people think little of it, but they pride themselves on their water. "What do you think of that water, sir?" was a question that puzzled me to answer at first, for I am not a connoisseur in drinking-water. If it had been a claret, I might have made a pretence of criticism. But water! Or if they had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether I thought it "hard" or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a particular tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid down by my host for his own drinking, completely puzzled me. I can no more tell waters apart than I can tell Chinamen. Of course I can discriminate between the outcome of the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it seems to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or, as scientific men say, to "the properties which they hold in solution," that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty much the same. So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, "What do you think of that water, sir?" I made the mistake of supposing it might be one of the extraordinary aqueous novelties for which this territory is so remarkable--hot-geyser water or petrifying water, or something else of the kind--and would smack my lips critically and venture on a suggestion of "lime," or "soda," or "alkali." But my host was always certain to be down with, "Oh, no; I assure you. That is reckoned the best water in the county!"