It is very hard for me to believe these things, Mr. Smith. It is very
hard for me to believe, for instance, about the gold plates. How could
they appear only to you and vanish again? It doesn't seem to me
reasonable."

"No more is it reasonable, but lots of things in the Bible is as lacking
in reason, like the sheet that appeared to Peter with beasts. But about
the plates, I'll tell you just how it was, even though it's not just the
way other folks has got hold of it. This is the truth, and you can think
how hard it was to put it much straighter to folks who didn't believe in
me then as they do now. The night that the angel came down three times
and stood at the foot of my bed, and told me to go and get the plates
and where they were to be found, my brain just seemed to go on fire. I
could see things I never saw any other time. Why, that night I saw
through the wooden wall and into the next room, just as if there hadn't
been any boards there, and I saw all the air about me full of motes,
just as they are in that sunbeam, and it was dark to other people. I
could hear, too, the cocks crowing and dogs barking for miles round; and
when morning came I got up and looked out, and it was as if I had my
eyes to a telescope. I could see the houses for miles and miles. I ran
up the hill and worked into the hole, and there I saw the plates, just
as the angel had said. I'll never forget to my dying day just what they
looked like, and the sort of writing they had. I took them up and
covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid
them, and told my folks. That night I was an awful sick man, and the
sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates
they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were
really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were
changed lest any one should see them and die. And I was to keep them
hidden. I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs;
firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words
of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry
out if I couldn't get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it
and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he
believed, and likewise the Whitmers. And the second proof is that after
I had buried the bricks by command, and we was far away from the place
where they lay, Martin Harris and Cowdery and Da