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Show 246 THE CITY OF THE SAINTS. CHAP. V. the building. The grounds are surrounded by a high wall of large pebble-like stones and mortar-the lime now used is very bad-and strengthened with semicircular buttresses. The main entrance faces south, with posts and chains before it for tethering horses. The "Lion House," occupied by Mrs. Young and her family, is in the eastern part of the square: it is so called from a stone lion placed over the large pillared portico, the work of a Mr. William Ward, who also cut the block of white limestone, with "Desere't". beneath a bee-hive, and other symbols, forwarded for the Washington Monument in 1853. It is lamentable to state that the .sculptor is now an apostate. The house resembles a two-storied East Indian tenement, with balcony and balustrade, here called an observatory, and is remarkable by its chunamed coat; it cost $65,000-being the best in the city, and was finished in one year. Before building it the Prophet lived in the White House, a humbler bungalow farther to the east; he has now given it up to his son, Joseph A. Young. On the west of the Lion House lies the private office in which we were received, and farther westward, but adjoining and connected by a passage, is the public office, where the Church and other business is transacted. This room, whi|h is larger than the former, has three desks on each side, the left on entering being;! those of the public, and the right those of the private clerks. The chief accountant is Mr. Daniel O'Calder, a Scotchman, whose sagacity in business makes him an alter ego of the President. At the end opposite the door there is a larger pupitre railed off, and a gallery runs round the upper wall. The bookcases are of the yellow box-elder wood, which takes a fine polish; and all is neat, clean, and business-like. Westward of the public office is the Bee House, so named from the sculptured bee-hive in front of it. The Hymenopter is the Mormon symbol of industry; moreover, Deser^t (pronounced Des-ere'tt) is, in " reformed Egyptian," the honey-bee; the term is applied with a certain violence to Utah, where, as yet, that industrious insebt is an utter stranger.* The Bee House is a large building, with the long walls facing east and west. It is double storied, with the lower windows, which are barred, oblong: the upper, ten in number, are narrow, and shaded by a small acute ogive or gable over each. The color of the building is a yellowish- white, which contrasts well with the green blinds, and the roof, which is acute, is tiled with shingles. It was finished in 1845, and is tenanted by the "plurality wives" and their families, who each have a bedroom, sitting-room, and closet simply and similarly furnished. There is a Moslem air of retirement about the Bee / * " And they (scil. Jared and his brother) did also carry with them Desere't, which by interpretation is a honey-bee ; and they did carry with them swarms of bees, and all manner of that which was upon the face of the land, seeds of every kind."-Book of Ether, chap, i., par. 3. |
