ed Mormonism because she had been as she thought
miraculously healed in answer to a prayer of a Mormon Elder. Soon after
reaching Salt Lake her husband took another wife. She was an American
and had been brought up in a Christian family, so she could not take
kindly to polygamy; she thought, however, that it was something ordered
by God and that she must be very wicked to have such bitterness in her
heart towards the woman who had won her husband's love. She said, "I
thought I would go for counsel to those who were wiser and better than
I, so I paid a visit to a model family, two wives in one house who were
said to live like sisters, and exceptionally happy. I told the first
wife my story and asked her how she attained her happiness. 'Happiness,'
she replied, 'I don't know the meaning of the word, I have never seen
a happy hour since that woman came into my house and never shall until
I drop into my grave.' The second wife said, 'for the sake of peace,
I have given up every right both as woman and wife. If it were not for
my child, I would have thrown myself into the river long ago.' Then I
went to two of Brigham's wives who were held up as examples. The first
to whom I spoke said, 'I have shed tears enough since I have been in
polygamy to drown myself twice over;' the other said, 'the plains from
the Mississippi River to Salt Lake are strewed with the bones of women
who were not strong enough to bear the burdens of polygamy, and the
cemetery here is full of them; but every one of these women will wear
a martyr's crown.'" Women who give their consent to the death knell of
happiness do it on the ground that their reward will be greater in
Heaven, and that the few years in this world is as nothing in view of
eternity. Buoyed up by these hopes, women leaving large families at home
with infants in their arms, accompany their husbands and give them in
marriage to young girls who have grown up at their very doors.

They have often left their husbands and even their children behind them
in foreign lands or in our own, to gain the coveted privilege of passing
the remnant of their days in communion with the Latter Day Saints in the
glorious State of Zion. These deluded women get their deserved
punishment for deserting the highest and acknowledged duties of life, by
the ignominy and contempt heaped upon them by those who allured them
from their homes. Contact with this institution has in a few cases not
only deadened all finer sen