Brigham Young used to encourage mothers to bring them, and said that he liked to hear them squalling in the Tabernacle. Whether he really liked it or not, the mothers did as he said, and the babies too, and the perpetual bleating of babies from every corner of the building makes it seem to this day as if religious service was being held in a sheepfold. Throughout the proceedings at Orderville babies were being constantly handed across from mother to neighbour and back from neighbour to mother. Others were being tossed up and down with that jerky, perpendicular motion which seems so soothing to the very young, but which reminded me of the popping up and down of the hammers when the "lid" of a piano is lifted up during a performance. But the baby is an irrepressible person, and at Orderville has it very much its own way. The Apostle's voice in prayer was accepted as a challenge to try their lungs, and the music (very good, by the way) as a mere obligato to their own vocalization. The patient gravity of the mothers throughout the whole performance, and the apparent indifference of the men, struck me as very curious--for I come from a country where one baby will plunge a whole church congregation into profanity, and where it is generally supposed that two crying together would empty heaven. Of the men of Orderville I can say sincerely that a healthier, more stalwart community I have never seen, while among the women, I saw many refined faces, and remarked that robust health seemed the rule. Next morning the children were paraded, and such a brigade of infantry as it was! Their legs (I think, though, they are known as "limbs" in America) were positively columnar, and their chubby little owners were as difficult to keep quietly in line as so much quicksilver. Orderville boasts that it is self-supporting and independent of outside help, and certainly in the matter of babies there seems no necessity for supplementing home manufactures by foreign imports. The average of births is as yet five in each family during the six years of the existence of the Order! Two were born the day I arrived. Unfortunately one of the most characteristic features of this family community was in abeyance during my visit--the common dining-table. For a rain-flood swept through the gorge above the settlement last winter and destroyed "the bakery." Since then the families have dined apart or clubbed together in small parties, but the wish of the majority is to see the old system revived, for though they live well now, they used, they say, to live even better when "the big table" was laid for its 200 guests at once. Self-supporting and well-directed, therefore, the Orderville "communists" bid fair to prove to the world that pious enthusiasm, if largely tempered with business judgment, can make a success of an experiment which has hitherto baffled all attempts based upon either one or the other alone. CHAPTER XIX. MORMON VIRTUES.