Mrs. Barlow, Lovell's mother, presented a charmingly antique
appearance--antique not in the sense of advanced years, but the young
antique--the gay, the lively, the never-fading antique. She had even a
girlish way of simpering and uttering absurdly rapturous exclamations.
Her face might have struck one at first as being of a strangely elongated
cast, but for its extreme prettiness and simplicity of expression. Her
nose was marked by a becoming scallop or two. Her eyes were of the ocean
blue. Her dark hair was arranged, behind, in the simplest and most
compact manner possible but, in front, art held delightful play. There,
it was parted, slightly to the left, over a broad, high forehead, and
disposed in braids of eight strands each, gracefully and lovingly looped
over Mrs. Barlow's ears.

The tide of cheerful converse was at its full when I came from school to
lunch. Amid this preponderance of female society, my friend, Grandpa,
shone with an ardent though faintly tolerated light, giving to the lively
flow of the discourse, an occasional salty and comprehensive flavor,
which dear Grandma Keeler held herself ever in calm and religious
readiness to restrain.

I listened, intensely interested, to the conversation, quite content, for
my own part, to keep silence; but I caught Mrs. Barlow's eye fixed on me
as if in abstracted, beatific thought. Soon was made known the result of
her meditation. She had concluded that I was incapable of descending to
subjects of an ordinary nature. Leaning far forward on the table, with a
smile more ecstatic than any that had gone before, she directed these
words at me in a clear, swift-flowing treble:--

"Oh, ain't it dreadful about them poor delewded Mormons?"

"Why?" I exclaimed, involuntarily, blinded by the absolute unexpectedness
of the question, and not knowing, in a dearth of daily papers, but that
the infatuated people alluded to had been swallowed up of an earthquake,
or fallen in a body into the Great Salt Lake.

"Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Barlow; "only I think it's dreadful, don't yew,
settin' such an example to Christian nations?"

"Dreadful! certainly!" I murmured, with intense relief, and allowed my
glasses to drop into my lap again.

Thus the conversation turned to subjects of a religious nature.

"Oh, I think it's so nice to have direct dealin's with the Almighty;
don't yew?" said Mrs. Barlow. "Oh, I think it is! Brother Mark Barlow
says he can hear the Lord speakin' to h