ine
the work. Smith thereupon thrust his gold plates and the rings which
connected them into a bag of beans and started for Susquehanna. Twenty
miles above that borough lies the village of Harpersville. Here lived
Benjamin Wasson, who married one of Mrs. Smith's sisters. Wasson was a
cabinetmaker, and, although not a Mormon, he made a strong box for the
plates. Smith announced that no one could look into the box and live,
but when his father-in-law, Hale, wished to try it Smith hid the box in
the woods. Hale, in his statement of 1834, declared that Smith
translated the plates in his own house, "with the stone in his hat and
his hat over his face," while the plates were still hid in the woods.

Fortunately for Smith, he did not have to depend upon Hale for a place
in which to carry on his operations. His wife had a six-acre place in a
corner of her father's farm, adjoining the farm of Joseph McKune. Upon
this little strip of land Smith moved a partly-finished house,
twenty-six feet broad, eighteen feet deep and fourteen feet in the
posts. It is evident, from the stovepipe through the roof, that the
edifice was never finished. After Smith left this region Martin Harris
came from Palmyra and sold the house to McKune, whose widow lived in it
for about forty years. It is now the farm-residence of her son, Benjamin
McKune, high sheriff of Susquehanna county, and lies close to the track
of the Erie Railway, a mile and a half west of Susquehanna Depot. The
elder McKune strongly suspected that Smith and his gang were
counterfeiters.

The prophet's original plan was that the plates should be translated by
an infant son, who should perform other miracles and become his
successor. But his expectations were doomed to disappointment, for in a
little fern-grown cemetery near at hand is a tottering slab of black
sandstone with the simple inscription, "In memory of an infant son of
Joseph and Emma Smith, June 15, 1828." Hence the magic spectacles were
very opportunely found with the plates. The little low chamber in
Smith's house was used as a translating-room. The prophet and his plates
were screened even from the sight of his scribes, Martin Harris, Oliver
Cowdery and Reuben Hale, by blankets secured with nails. While the
translation was going on the neighbors frequently called to discuss the
forthcoming book, which, it was alleged, would make the Hale family very
rich. Occasionally a visitor was allowed to feel the thickness of the