In beginning this letter I meant to describe the city, but in the company of these noble old mountains, it is not easy to bend one’s attention upon anything else.  Salt Lake cannot be called a very beautiful town, neither is there anything ugly or repulsive about it.  From the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills, or old lake benches, toward Fort Douglas it is seen to occupy the sloping gravelly delta of City Creek, a fine, hearty stream that comes pouring from the snows of the mountains through a majestic glacial canyon; and it is just where this stream comes forth into the light on the edge of the valley of the Jordan that the Mormons have built their new Jerusalem.

At first sight there is nothing very marked in the external appearance of the town excepting its leafiness.  Most of the houses are veiled with trees, as if set down in the midst of one grand orchard; and seen at a little distance they appear like a field of glacier boulders overgrown with aspens, such as one often meets in the upper valleys of the California Sierra, for only the angular roofs are clearly visible.

Perhaps nineteen twentieths of the houses are built of bluish-gray adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine cottage homes which promise simple comfort within.  They are set well back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost every one has a thrifty orchard at the sides and around the back.  The gardens are laid out with great simplicity, indicating love for flowers by people comparatively poor, rather than deliberate efforts of the rich for showy artistic effects.  They are like the pet gardens of children, about as artless and humble, and harmonize with the low dwellings to which they belong.  In almost every one you find daisies, and mint, and lilac bushes, and rows of plain English tulips.  Lilacs and tulips are the most characteristic flowers, and nowhere have I seen them in greater perfection.  As Oakland is pre-eminently a city of roses, so is this Mormon Saints’ Rest a city of lilacs and tulips.  The flowers, at least, are saintly, and they are surely loved.  Scarce a home, however obscure, is without them, and the simple, unostentatious manner in which they are planted and gathered in pots and boxes about the windows shows how truly they are prized.

The surrounding commons, the marshy levels of the Jordan, and dry, gravelly lake benches on the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills are now gay with wild flowers, chief among which are a species of phlox, with an abundance of rich pink corollas, growing among sagebrush in showy tufts, and a beautiful papilionaceous plant, with silky leaves and large clusters of purple flowers, banner, wings, and keel exquisitely shaded, a mertensia, hydrophyllum, white boragewort, orthocarpus, several species of violets, and a tall scarlet gilia.  It is delightful to see how eagerly all these are sought after by the children, both boys and girls.  Every day that I have gone botanizing I have met groups of little Latter-Days with their precious bouquets, and at such times it was hard to believe the dark, bloody passages of Mormon history.