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Show MORMON BED- ROOMS. 123 from every crack and knot- hole. During this season of comparative inaction, we received from the authorities and citizens of the community every kindness that the most warmhearted hospitality could dictate; and no eflfort was spared to render us as comfort* able as their own limited means would admit. Indeed, we were much better lodged than many of our neighbours; for, as has been previously observed, very many families were obliged still to lodge wholly or in part in their wagons, which, being covered, served, when taken off from the wheels and set upon the ground, to make bedrooms, of limited dimensions it is true, but yet exceedingly comfortable. Many of these were comparatively large and commodious, apd, when carpeted and furnished with a little stove, formed an additional apartment or back building to the small cabin, with which they frequently communicated by a door. It certainly argued a high tone of morals and an habitual observance of good order and decorum, to find women and children thus securely slumbering in the midst of a large city, with no protection from midnight molestation other than a wagon- cover of linen and the aegis of the law* In the very next enclosure to that occupied by our party, a whole family of children had no other shelter than one of these wagons, where they slept all the winter, literally out of doors, there being no communication whatever with the inside of their parents' house. The founding, within the space of three years, of a large and flourishing community, upon a spot so remote from the abodes of man, so completely shut out by natural barriers from the rest of the world, so entirely unconnected by; watercourses with either of the oceans'that wash the shores of this continent-^ a country offering no advantages of inland navigation or of foreign commerce, but, on the contrary, isolated by vast uninhabitable deserts, and only to be reached by long, painful, and often hazardous journeys by land- presents an anomaly so very peculiar, that it deserves more than a passing notice. In this young and progressive country of ours, where cities grow up in a day, and states spring into existence in a year, the successful planting of a colony, where the natural advantages have been such as to hold out the promise of adequate reward to the projectors, would have excited no surprise; but the success of an enterprise under circumstances so at variance with all our preconceived ideas of its probability, may well be considered as one of the most remarkable incidents of the present age. A brief reference to the early history of this people, and to the |