to hold the plaster. The material is clay or silt from the creek, puddled with water, and if saltish it is better than sweet soil; unity of color and formation are the tests of goodness. Each brick weighs, when dry, 16 lbs., and the mould is mostly double. On the day after making they are stacked, and allowed to stand for two months; the season is June, July, and August, after which it becomes too cold. The workman is paid 75 per cent.; 400 per diem would be tolerable, 700 good work; thus an able-bodied bricklayer can make twenty-one shillings a day—rather a contrast to the wages of an unfortunate laborer in England.
Returning home, we walked through Mr. Little's garden, and admired its neatness. The fruit-trees were mostly barren; in this year the city sets down a loss of $100,000 by frost. I tasted, for the first time, the Californian grape, uvas admodum maturas, ita voluit anni intemperies;" they not a little resembled the northern French. A single vine sometimes bears $100 worth. There was a little rhubarb, but it is not much used where sugar costs forty-five cents per pound. After supping with Mr. Little, his wife and family, we returned to the andronitis, and prepared for the night with a chat. The principal point illustrated was the curious amount of connection caused by polygamy; all men, calling each other brothers, become cousins, and it is hardly possible, among the old Mormons, to stop a child in the street without finding that it is a relative. I was surprised at the comfort, even the luxury, of a Mormon householder in these remote wilds, and left it with a most favorable impression.
At the dawn of the next day we prepared to set out; from the city to the mouth of the kanyon the distance is about thirteen, and to the lakelets twenty-seven miles. Mr. Little now accompanied us on horseback, and his son James, whom I may here safely call a boy, was driving a buck-board. This article is a light gig-body mounted upon a thin planking, to which luggage is strapped; it can go where a horse can tread, and is easier to both animals than riding down steep hills. The boy, like Mormon juveniles generally, had a great aptitude at driving, riding, and using the axe; he attended a school, but infinitely preferred that of Nature, and showed all the disposition to become the father of a stout, brave Western man. As in the wilder parts of Australia, where the pedagogue has less pay than the shepherd, "keep a school" is here equivalent to semi-starvation; there is no superstitious aversion, as the Gentiles have asserted, to a modicum of education, but the state of life renders manual labor more honored and profitable. While the schoolmaster gains $2 50 per mensem, a ditcher would make the same sum per diem. Besides impatience of study, the boys are ever anxious to become men—"bring up a child and away it goes," says the local proverb—and literature will not yet enable a youth to marry and to set up house-keeping in the Rocky Mountains.
