after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners of juvenile
phenomena. When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both
of the young girls addressed her as "mother," I was emboldened to tell
her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.

"They _are_ pretty," said the old lady, demurely; "but they are the
children of my son"; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and
heels into Mormon realities at once, she added,--"Those young ladies are
the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool,--young
Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball's wife."

A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not
distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off
his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical
workings. I stared,--I believe I blushed a little,--I tried to stutter a
reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost,
so that I felt they must read it in my face, was, "How _can_ these young
women sit looking at each other's babies without flying into each
other's faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other's
hair?" Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying
that it was a triumph of grace.

Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself. She was a woman of
remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have
been the oracle of tea-fights, the ruling spirit of donation-visits, in
any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been
New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief
Directress's chair of half a dozen Woman's Aid Societies and
Associations for Moral Reform. Yet here was this strong-minded woman, as
her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and
right-hand helper through a married life reaching into middle-age,
witnessing her property in that husband's affections subdivided and
parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only
without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the
approbation of her intellect. Though few first wives in Utah had learned
to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and
vigorous-natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of
polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent. She was one of the strangest
psychological problems I ever met. Indeed, I am half inclined to think
that she embraced M