to examine them, for Weber River is flooding the canon, and in many places has washed away the narrow space along which wagons are wont to make their way, so that I have to trundle slowly along the railway track.  Now the road turns to the left, and in a few minutes the rugged and picturesque walls of the canon are towering in imposing heights toward the clouds.  The Weber River comes rushing — a resistless torrent — from under the dusky shadows of the mountains through which it runs for over fifty miles, and onward to the pkin below, where it assumes a more moderate pace, as if conscious that it has at last escaped from the hurrying turmoil of its boisterous march down the mountain.

Advancing into the yawning jaws of the range, a continuously resounding roar is heard in advance, which gradually becomes louder as I proceed eastward; in a short time the source of the noise is discovered, and a weird scene greets my enraptured vision.  At a place where the fall is tremendous, the waters are opposed in their mad march by a rough-and-tumble collection of huge, jagged rocks, that have at some time detached themselves from the walls above, and come crashing down into the bed of the stream.  The rushing waters, coming with haste from above, appear to pounce with insane fury on the rocks that dare thus to obstruct their path; and then for the next few moments all is a hissing, seething, roaring caldron of strife, the mad waters seeming to pounce with ever-increasing fury from one imperturbable antagonist to another, now leaping clear over the head of one, only to dash itself into a cloud of spray against another, or pour like a cataract against its base in a persistent, endless struggle to undermine it; while over all tower the dark, shadowy rocks, grim witnesses of the battle.  This spot is known by the appropriate name of “The Devil’s Gate.”  Wherever the walls of the canon recede from the river’s brink, and leave a space of cultivable land, there the industrious Mormons have built log or adobe cabins, and converted the circumscribed domain into farms, gardens, and orchards.  In one of these isolated settlements I seek shelter from a passing shower at the house of a “three-ply Mormon " (a Mormon with three wives), and am introduced to his three separate and distinct better-halves; or, rather, one should say, " better-quarters,” for how can anything have three halves.  A noticeable feature at all these farms is the universal plurality of women around the house, and sometimes in the field.  A familiar scene in any farming community is a woman out in the field, visiting her husband, or, perchance, assisting him in his labors.  The same thing is observable at the Mormon settlements along the Weber River — only, instead of one woman, there are generally two or three, and perhaps yet another standing in the door of the house.  Passing through two tunnels that burrow through rocky spurs stretching across the canon, as though to obstruct farther progress,