Except such ornaments, however, they lacked nothing most becoming the attire of decorous maidens. The neatly darned white stocking, and clean bright petticoat, the artistically clear-starched collar and chemisette, the something faded, only because too well washed, lawn or gingham gown, that fitted modishly to the waist of its pretty wearer-these, if any of them spoke of poverty, spoke of a poverty that had known its better days.

With the rest attended the Elders of the Church within call, including nearly all the chiefs of the High Council, with their wives and children. They, the gravest and most trouble worn, seemed the most anxious of any to be first to throw off the burden of heavy thoughts. Their leading off the dancing in a great double cotillion was the signal bade the festivity commence. To the canto of debonnair

violins, the cheer of horns, the jingle of sleigh-bells, and the jovial snoring of the tambourine, they did dance! None of your minuets or other mortuary processions of gentles in etiquette, tight shoes, and pinching gloves, but the spirited and scientific displays of our venerated and merry grandparents, who were not above following the fiddle to the Fox-Chase Inn or Gardens of Gray's Ferry. French fours, Copenhagen jigs, Virginia reels, and the like forgotten figures, executed with the spirit of people too happy to be slow, or bashful, or constrained. Light hearts, lithe figures, and light feet, had it their own way from an early hour till after the sun had dipped behind the sharp sky line of the Omaha hills. Silence was then called, and a well-cultivated mezzo-soprano voice, belonging to a young lady with fair face and dark eyes, gave, with quartette accompaniment, a little song, the notes of which I have been unsuccessful in repeated efforts to obtain since, a version of the text, touching to all earthly wanderers:

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'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept:

We wept when we remember Zion."

There was danger of some expression of feeling when the song was over, for it had begun to draw tears; but breaking the quiet with his hard voice, an Elder asked the blessing of Heaven on all who, with purity of heart, and brotherhood of spirit, had mingled in that society, and then all dispersed, hastening to cover from the falling dews. All, I remember, but some splendid Indians, who, in cardinal scarlet blankets and feathered leggings, had been making foreground figures for the dancing rings, like those in Mr. West's picture of our Philadelphia Treaty, and staring their inability to comprehend the wonderful performances. These loitered to the last, as if unwilling to seek their abject homes.

Well as I knew the peculiar fondness of the Mormons for music,

their orchestra in service on this occasion astonished me by its numbers and fine drill. The story was, that an eloquent Mormon missionary had converted its members in a body at an English town, a stronghold of the sect, and that they took up their trumpets, trombones, drums, and hautboys together, and followed him to America.

When the refugees from Nauvoo were hastening to part with their table-ware, jewellery, and almost every other fragment of metal wealth they possessed that was not iron, they had never a thought of giving up the instruments of this favourite band. And when the battalion was enlisted, though high inducements were offered some of the performers to accompany it, they all refused. Their fortunes went with the Camp of the Tabernacle. They had led the Farewell Service in the Nauvoo Temple. Their office now was to guide the monster choruses and Sunday hymns; and like the trumpets of silver made of a whole piece "for the calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps," to knoll the people in to church. Some of their wind instruments, indeed, were uncommonly full and puretoned, and in that clear dry air could be heard to a great distance. It had the strangest effect in the world, to listen to their sweet music winding over the uninhabited country. Something in the style of a Moravian death-tone blown at day-break, but altogether unique. It might be when you were hunting a ford over the Great Platte, the dreariest of all wild rivers, perplexed among the far-reaching sandbars and curlew shallows of its shifting bed :—the wind rising would bring you the first faint thought of a melody; and, as you listened, borne down upon the gust that swept past you a cloud of the dry sifted sands, you recognised it—perhaps a home-loved theme of Henry Proch or Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, away there in the Indian Marches!

The battalion gone, the host again moved on. The tents, which had gathered on the hill summits, like white birds hesitating to venture on the long flight over the river, were struck one after another, and the dwellers in them and their waggons, and their cattle, hastened down to cross it at a ferry in the valley, which they made ply night and day. A little beyond the landing, they formed their companies, and made their preparations for the last and longest stage of their journey. It was a more serious matter to cross the mountains then than now, that the thirst of our people for the gold of California has made the region between them and their desire such literally trodden ground.

Thanks to this wonderful movement, I may dismiss an effort to describe the incidents of emigrant life upon the Plains, presuming that you have been made more than familiar with them already, by the

many repeated descriptions of which they have been the subject. The desert march, the ford, the quicksand, the Indian battle, the bison chase, the prairie fire: the adventures of the Mormons comprised every variety of these varieties; but I could not hope to invest them with the interest of novelty. The character of their every-day life, its routine and conduct, alone offered any exclusive or marked peculiarity. Their romantic devotional observances, and their admirable concert of purpose and action, met the eye at once. After these, the stranger was most struck, perhaps, by the strict order of march, the unconfused closing up to meet attack, the skilful securing of the cattle upon the halt, the system with which the watches were set at night to guard them and the lines of corral -with other similar circumstances indicative of the maintenance of a high state of discipline. Every ten of their waggons was under the care of a captain. This captain of ten,

as they termed him, obeyed a captain of fifty; who, in turn, obeyed his captain of a hundred, or directly a member of what they call the High Council of the Church. All these were responsible and determined men, approved of by the people for their courage, discretion, and experience. So well recognised were the results of this organiza

tion, that bands of hostile Indians have passed by comparative small parties of Mormons, to attack much larger, but less compact bodies of other emigrants.

The most striking feature, however, of the Mormon emigration, was undoubtedly their formation of the Tabernacle Camps, and temporary Stakes, or Settlements, which renewed, in the sleeping solitudes everywhere along their road, the cheering signs of intelligent and hopeful life.

I will make this remark plainer by describing to you one of these camps, with the daily routine of its inhabitants. I select at random, for my purpose, a large camp upon the delta between the Nebraska and Missouri, in the territory disputed between the Omaha and Otto and Missouri Indians. It remained pitched here for nearly two months, during which period I resided in it.

It was situated near the Petit Papillon, or Little Butterfly River, and upon some finely-rounded hills that encircle a favourite cool spring. On each of these a square was marked out; and the waggons, as they arrived, took their positions along its four sides in double rows, so as to leave a roomy street or passage-way between them. The tents were disposed also in rows, at intervals, between the waggons. The cattle were folded in high-fenced yards outside. The quadrangle inside was left vacant for the sake of ventilation, and the streets, covered in with leafy arbour work, and kept scrupulously clean, formed a shaded cloister walk. This was the place of exercise for slowly-recovering invalids, the day-home of the infants, and the evening promenade of all.

From the first formation of the camp, all its inhabitants were constantly and laboriously occupied. Many of them were highly educated mechanics, and seemed only to need a day's anticipated rest to engage them at the forge, loom, or turning-lathe, upon some needed chore of work. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent repeating rifle, that loads by slides instead of cylinders; and one of the neatest finished fire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought from scraps of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half dollars, under a hot July sun, in a spot where the average height of the grass was above the workman's shoulders. I have seen a cobbler, after the halt of his party on the march, hunting along the river bank for a lap-stone, in the twilight, that he might finish a famous boot-sole by the camp fire; and I have had a piece of cloth, the wool of which was sheared, and dyed, and spun, and woven, during a progress over three hundred miles.

Their more interesting occupations, however, were those growing out of their peculiar circumstances and position. The chiefs were

seldom without some curious affair on hand to settle with the restless Indians; while the immense labour and responsibility of the conduct of their unwieldy moving army, and the commissariat of its hundreds of famishing poor, also devolved upon them. They had good men they called Bishops, whose special office it was to look up the cases of extremest suffering, and their relief parties were out night and day to scour over every trail.

At this time, say two months before the final expulsion from Nauvoo, there were already, along three hundred miles of the road between that city and our Papillon Camp, over two thousand emigrating waggons, besides a large number of nondescript turn-outs, the motley make-shifts of poverty, from the unsuitably heavy-cart, that lumbered on mysteriously, with its sick driver hidden under its counterpane cover, to the crazy two-wheeled trundle, such as our own poor employ for the conveyance of their slop-barrels, this pulled along, may be, by a little dry, dogged heifer, and rigged up only to drag some such light weight as a baby, a sack of meal, or a pack of clothes and bedding.

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Some of them were in distress from losses upon the way. A strong trait of the Mormons was their kindness to their brute dependents, and particularly to their beasts of draught. They gave them the holiday of the Sabbath whenever it came round. I believe they would have washed them with old wine, after the example of the emigrant Carthaginians, had they had any. Still, in the Slave-coast heats, under which the animals had to move, they sometimes foundered. Sometimes, too, they strayed off in the night, or were mired in morasses, or oftener were stolen by Indians, who found market covert for such plunder among the horse-thief whites of the frontier. But the great mass of these pilgrims of the desert was made up of poor folks, who had fled in destitution from Nauvoo, and been refused a resting-place by the people of Iowa.

It is difficult fully to understand the state of helplessness in which some of these would arrive, after accomplishing a journey of such extent, under circumstances of so much privation and peril. The fact was, they seemed to believe that all their trouble would be at an end if they could only come up with their comrades at the great camps. For this they calculated their resources, among which their power of endurance was by much the largest and most reliable item, and they were not disappointed if they arrived with these utterly exhausted.

I remember a signal instance of this at the Papillon Camp :

It was that of a joyous-hearted clever fellow, whose songs and fiddle-tunes were the life and delight of Nauvoo in its merry days. I forget his story, and how exactly it fell about, that, after a Mormon's

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