Presently we debouched upon the main thoroughfare, the centre of population and business, where the houses of the principal Mormon dignitaries and the stores of the Gentile merchants combine to form the city’s only street which can be properly so called. It is, indeed, both street and market, for, curious to say, New Zion has not yet built for herself a bazar or market-place. Nearly opposite the Post Office, in a block on the eastern side, with a long veranda, supported by trimmed and painted posts, was a two-storied, pent-roofed building, whose sign-board, swinging to a tall, gibbet-like flagstaff, dressed for the occasion, announced it to be the Salt Lake House, the principal if not the only establishment of the kind in New Zion. In the Far West, one learns not to expect much of the hostelry;[18] I had not seen aught so grand for many a day. Its depth is greater than its frontage, and behind it, secured by a _porte cochère_, is a large yard for corralling cattle. A rough-looking crowd of drivers, drivers’ friends, and idlers, almost every man openly armed with revolver and bowie-knife, gathered round the doorway to greet Jim, and “prospect” the “new lot”; and the host came out to assist us in transporting our scattered effects. We looked vainly for a bar on the ground floor; a bureau for registering names was there, but (temperance, in public at least, being the order of the day) the usual tempting array of bottles and decanters was not forthcoming; up stairs we found a Gentile ball-room, a tolerably furnished sitting-room, and bedchambers, apparently made out of a single apartment by partitions too thin to be strictly agreeable. The household had its deficiencies; blacking, for instance, had run out, and servants could not be engaged till the expected arrival of the hand-cart train. However, the proprietor, Mr. Townsend, a Mormon, from the State of Maine--when expelled from Nauvoo, he had parted with land, house, and furniture for $50--who had married an Englishwoman, was in the highest degree civil and obliging, and he attended personally to our wants, offered his wife’s services to Mrs. Dana, and put us all in the best of humors, despite the closeness of the atmosphere, the sadness ever attending one’s first entrance into a new place, the swarms of “emigration flies”--so called because they appear in September with the emigrants, and, after living for a month, die off with the first snow--and a certain populousness of bedstead, concerning which the less said the better. Such, gentle reader, are the results of my first glance at Zion on the tops of the mountains, in the Holy City of the Far West. Our journey had occupied nineteen days, from the 7th to the 25th of August, both included; and in that time we had accomplished not less than 1136 statute miles.