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[Salt Lake City]

"C.S.W.(West Strand) tells me that, having resided for some time in Salt Lake City, he is unable to indorse my views as to the purity and cleanliness of the capital of Utah. A casual visitor he adds (I was the most casual of visitors) might be deceived by the pleasant aspect of its streets, and the little streams of running water; but my correspondent declares that there is no system of drainage in this town of thirty thousand inhabitants; muck-heaps are in the midst of the gardens which I admired so much, and "numbers of persons, especially children, are continually carried off by that dread disease, diphtheria."

Now, of Salt Lake City I can only say, quoting (and slightly altering) the late Thomas Haynes Bayley (or Bailey ?):—

I saw her for a moment,
But methinks I see her now,
With a wreath of huckleberries
Upon her snowy brow.

All I can say, in addition, is that, if Salt Lake City be indeed the unwholesome place which it is declared to be by my correspondent, it must resemble, even more closely than I thought was the case, the Stratford-on-Avon so graphically described by Mr. J.O. Halliwell-Phillips's "Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare" For I did not quote Mr. Halliwell-Phillips's allusions to all the nuisances at Stratford: "small middens were ever in the course of accumulation; the receptacles of offal and of every description of nastiness;" nor did I mention that in April, 1552, John Shakespeare, the father of the poet, was fined the sum of twelvepence for having amassed a conspicuously offensive muck-heap in front of his house in Henley-street.

Source: The Illustrated London News, No.2257—Vol. LXXXI, Saturday, August 5, 1882, p.131