Just outside the city-limits, near the northeastern corner of the wall, lies the Cemetery, on a piece of undulating ground traversed by deep gullies, and unadorned even by a solitary tree,—­the only vegetation sprouting out of its parched soil being a melancholy crop of weeds interspersed with languid sunflowers.  The disproportion between the deaths of adults and those of children, which has been a subject for comment by every writer on Mormonism, is peculiarly noticeable there.  Most of the graves are indicated only by rough boards, on which are scrawled rudely, with pencil or paint, the names and ages of the dead, and usually also verses from the Bible and scraps of poetry; but among all the inscriptions it is remarkable that there is not a single quotation from the “Book of Mormon.”  The graves are totally neglected after the bodies are consigned to them.  Nowhere has a shrub or a flower been planted by any affectionate hand, except in one little corner of the inclosure which is assigned to the Gentiles, between whose dust and that of the Mormons there seems to exist a distinction like that which prevails in Catholic countries between the ashes of heretics and those of faithful churchmen.  The mode of burial is singularly careless.  A funeral procession is rarely seen; and such instances are mentioned by travellers as that of a father bearing to the grave the coffin of his own child upon his shoulder.

The interiors of the houses are as neat as could be expected, considering the extent of the families.  Very often, three wives, one husband, and half-a-dozen children will be huddled together in a hovel containing only two habitable rooms,—­an arrangement of course subversive of decency.  Few people are able to purchase carpets, and their furniture is of the coarsest and commonest kind.  There are few, if any, families which maintain servants.  In that of Brigham Young, each woman has a room assigned her, for the neatness of which she is herself responsible;—­Young’s own chamber is in the rear of the office of the President of the Church, upon the ground floor.  The precise number of the female inmates can often be computed from the exterior of the houses.  These being frequently divided into compartments, each with its own entrance from the yard, and its own chimney, and being generally only one story in height, the number of doors is an exact index to that of residents.

The domestic habits of the people vary greatly according to their nativity.  Of the forty-five thousand inhabitants of the Territory, at least one-half are immigrants from England and Wales,—­the scum of the manufacturing towns and mining districts, so superstitious as to have been capable of imbibing the Mormon faith,—­though between what is preached in Great Britain and what is practised in America there exists a wide difference,—­and so destitute in circumstances as to have been incapable of deteriorating their fortunes by emigration.  Possibly one-fifth are Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians.