Chapter XIII

We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables--a
great variety and as great abundance. We walked about the streets some,
afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination
in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon.
This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes--a land of
enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask
every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and
we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut
as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and
shoulders--for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon
family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary
concentric rings of its home circle.

By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other
"Gentiles," and we spent a sociable hour with them. "Gentiles" are
people who are not Mormons. Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of
himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an
overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the
hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely,
disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a
ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.
This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a
chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants
on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the
general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it "too
many for him" and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that
something he had eaten had not agreed with him.

But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. It was
the exclusively Mormon refresher, "valley tan."

Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky,
or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in
Utah. Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone. If I
remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom
by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful,
except they confined themselves to "valley tan."

Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level
streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen
thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible
drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through
every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim
dwellings, built of "frame" and sunburned brick--a great thriving orchard
and garden behind every one of them, apparently--branches