The 24th of July, the great Mormon anniversary, was suffered to pass without celebration; but its recurrence must have suggested anxious thoughts and bitter recollections to a great part of the population.  When they remembered their enthusiastic declaration of independence only one year before, the warlike demonstrations which followed it, the prophecies of Young that the Lord would smite the army as he smote the hosts of Sennacherib, the fever of hate and apprehension into which they had been worked, and contrasted that period of excitement with their present condition, they must, indeed, have found abundant material for meditation.  By the emigration southward they had lost at least four months of the most valuable time of the year.  Their families had been subjected to every variety of exposure and hardship.  Their ready money had been extorted from them by the Currency Association, or consumed in the expenses of transporting their movables to Lake Utah.  And more than all, the fields had so suffered by their absence, that the crops were diminished to at least one-half the yield of an ordinary year.  To a community the mass of which lives from hand to mouth, this was a most serious loss.

Almost all agriculture in Utah is carried on by the aid of irrigation.  From April till October hardly a shower falls upon the soil, which parches and cracks in the hot sunshine.  The settlements are all at the base of the mountains, where they can take advantage of the brooks that leap down through the canons.  They are, therefore, necessarily scattered along the line of the main Wahsatch range, from the Roseaux River, which flows into the Salt Lake from the north, to the Vegas of the Santa Clara,—­a distance of nearly four hundred miles.  The labor expended in ditching has been immense, but it has been confined wholly to tapping the smaller streams.

By damming the Jordan in Salt Lake Valley and the Sevier in Parawan Valley, and distributing their water over the broad bottom-lands, on which the only vegetation now is wild sage and greasewood, the area of arable ground might be quintupled; and any considerable increase of population will render such an undertaking indispensable; for the narrow strip which is fertilized by the mountain-brooks yields scarcely more than enough to supply the present number of inhabitants.  Nowhere does it exceed two or three miles in breadth, except along the eastern shore of Lake Utah, where it extends from the base of the mountains to the verge of the lake.

Almost all cereals and vegetables attain the utmost perfection, rivalling the most luxuriant productions of California.  Within the last few years the cultivation of the Chinese sugar-cane has been introduced, and has proved successful.  In Salt Lake City considerable attention is paid to horticulture.  Peaches, apples, and grapes grow to great size, at the same time retaining excellent flavor.  The grape which is most common is that of the vineyards of Los Angeles.  In the