For water is the philosopher's stone; the fairy All-Good; the First Cause; the everything that men here strive after as the source of all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, pearls and rubies, and virtuous women--which are "above rubies"--everything in fact that is precious. It spirits up Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives industry a talisman to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs at man, and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. With it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is ploughed out of his possession. Without it, greasewood and gophers divide the wilderness between them. With it, homesteads spring up and gather the orchards around them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is broken only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the laughter of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and the cheery voices of the mill-wheels by the stream. Without it, the world seems a dreary failure. With it, it brightens into infinite possibilities. No wonder then that men prize it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel about it. I wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped trees, and wind, and the sun, for far less cause. Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon settlements as the supreme importance of water. It determines locations, regulates their proportions, and controls their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres barren--though I hate using such a word for a country of such beautiful wild flowers--because there is no water. There is a small nook bursting with farmsteads, and trees, because there is water. Men buy and sell water-claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in sight," and appraise each other's estates not by the stock that grazes on them, or the harvests gathered from them, but by the water-rights that go with them. Thus, a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring on it, and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat." Another has acquired the right of the head-waters of a little mountain stream; he is spoken of as owning "the finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put a plough into the ground, the other has not a single head of cattle! But each possessed the "open sesame" to untold riches, and in a country given over to this new form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy.