hed. She knew that the truth was being spoken to her,
and her heart leaped forth to do reverence, not only to it, but to the
man who could find it in the midst of such insults. Ephraim was good. If
he could only know how good Angel was, he would not have asked her to
return. All thought of deserting the new cause now was gone; the blood
that had trickled from Smith's bruised head, the danger that menaced
Halsey, sustained her. She wrote to Ephraim to that effect.

Some days after, when driving past Biery's hotel from a meeting he had
been holding in the town of Geneva, Joseph Smith entered and laid before
Susannah books for the cultivation of her mind--a Latin grammar and
exercise book like his own, a Universal History, and a primer of Natural
Philosophy. He told her that in two weeks, when she had mastered their
contents, he would bring her others. He left hastily, the business of
the Church pressing.

In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no
longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a
popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men
know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that
writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart.
There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism,
and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from
brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits
down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson.
Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his
grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far
behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her.

There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for
the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of
lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity.

Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave
the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle
flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a
large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked
counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with
whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising
that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her
understandi