hose who bear persecution, not in its reality
but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.

All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with
the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the
painful operation of taking the tar from Smith's lacerated skin. The
prophet bore himself well. Now and then, through the thin partition the
watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his
determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had
appointed the next day.

At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon's house. The animal was
safe. When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those
within the house. Rigdon was raving in delirium. He had, it seemed, been
dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony
ground. They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers. He lay
upon a small bed in horrible condition. His wife, with swollen eyes and
pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out
with vain efforts to soothe him. His mother, a thin and dark old woman,
vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out
of the room silently, as though to say, "This is the work of those whose
virtue you extolled."

The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of
dawn. The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as
innocence may sleep. The famous preacher, and all those souls that he
had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in
silence. Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the
roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to
renewed wrath. Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past
night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey's safety. She gave her
horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had
reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was
being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight,
with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths
of the leafless nut woods. It was high day, and the people were
gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through
the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.

As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to
preach. His face was very white and sad. Susannah's glad relief,
fatigue, and exci