But Some Of Us Felt Smothered, And As Soon As The Affair Was Over, Started Immediately For The Camp, Where We Could Have Exhilarating Mountain Air Once More.

It was really one whole day stolen from our outing!

We can always have crowded rooms, receptions, and breakfasts, wherever we happen to be in the East, but when again will we be in a glorious camp like this - and our days here are to be so few! From here we are to go to Salt Lake City for a week or two.

THE WALKER HOUSE, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH. September, 1888.

THE weather is still very warm, but not hot enough to keep us from going to the lake as usual this morning. The ride is about eighteen miles long, and is always more or less pleasant. The cars, often long trains, are narrow gauge, open, and airy. The bathing is delightful, but wholly unlike anything to be found elsewhere. The wonderfully clear water is cool and exhilarating, but to swim in it is impossible, it is so heavy from its large percentage of salt. So every one floats, but not at all as one floats in other waters. We lie upon our backs, of course - at least we think we do - but our feet are always out of the water, and our heads straight up, with large straw hats upon them.

They have a way of forming human chains on the water that often startles one at first. They are made by hooking one's arms close to the shoulder over the ankles of another person, still another body hooking on to you, and so on. Then each one will stretch his or her arms out and paddle backward, and in this way we can go about without much effort, and can see all the funny things going on around us. As I am rather tall, second position in a chain is almost always given to me, and my first acquaintance with masculine toes close to my face came very near being disastrous. The feet stood straight up, and the toes looked so very funny, with now and then a twitch back or front, that soon I wanted to laugh, and the more I tried not to the more hysterical I became. My shoulders were shaking, and the owner of the toes - a pompous man - began to suspect that I was laughing and probably at the toes. Still he continued to twist them around - one under the other - in an astonishing way, that made them fascinating. The head of the chain - the pompous man - became ominously silent. At last I said, almost sobbing, "Can't you see for yourself how funny all those things are in front of us? They look like wings in their pin-feather stage - only they are on the wrong side - and I am wondering if the black stockings would make real black wings - and what some of us would do with them, after all!" After that there was less pompous dignity and less hysteria, although the toes continued to wigwag.

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