But nothing more of a bearish nature occurs, and the early gloaming finds me at Tacoma, a village near the Utah boundary line.  There is an awful calamity of some sort hovering over this village.  One can feel it in the air.  The habitues of the hotel barroom sit around, listless and glum.  When they speak at all it is to predict all sorts of difficulties for me in my progress through Utah and Wyoming Territories.  “The black gnats of the Salt Lake mud flat’ll eat you clean up,” snarls one.  “Bear River’s flooding the hull kintry up Weber Ca¤on way,” growls another.  “The slickest thing you kin do, stranger, is to board the keers and git out of this,” says a third, in a tone of voice and with an emphasis that plainly indicates his great disgust at “this.”  By " this” he means the village of Tacoma; and he is disgusted with it.  They are all disgusted with it and with the whole world this evening, because Tacoma is “out of whiskey.”  Yes, the village is destitute of whiskey; it should have arrived yesterday, and hasn’t shown up yet; and the effect on the society of the bar-room is so depressing that I soon retire to my couch, to dream of Utah’s strange intermingling of forbidding deserts and beautiful orchards through which my route now leads me.

CHAPTER III.

THROUGH MORMON-LAND AND OVER THE ROCKIES.

A dreary-looking country is the " Great American Desert,” in Utah, the northern boundary line of which I traverse next morning.  To the left of the road is a low chain of barren hills; to the right, the uninviting plain, over which one’s eye wanders in vain for some green object that might raise hopes of a less desolate region beyond; and over all hangs an oppressive silence — the silence of a dead country — a country destitute of both animal and vegetable life.  Over the great desert hangs a smoky haze, out of which Pilot Peak, thirty-eight miles away, rears its conical head 2,500 feet above the level plain at its base.

Some riding is obtained at intervals along this unattractive stretch of country, but there are no continuously ridable stretches, and the principal incentive to mount at all is a feeling of disgust at so much compulsory walking.  A noticeable feature through the desert is the almost unquenchable thirst that the dry saline air inflicts upon one.  Reaching a railway section-house, I find no one at home; but there is a small underground cistern of imported water, in which “wrigglers " innumerable wriggle, but which is otherwise good and cool.  There is nothing to drink out of, and the water is three feet from the surface; while leaning down to try and drink, the wooden framework at the top gives way and precipitates me head first into the water.  Luckily, the tank is large enough to enable me to turn round and reappear at the surface, head first, and with considerable difficulty I scramble out again, with, of course, not a dry thread on me.