sadly;
"I am scared enough; I am scared sometimes of the very water I go into
to baptize in, let alone men that want to murder me; but I am more
afraid to go against my revelations, for I know if I went against them
there would be nothing for me but the pit and eternal fire. I don't say
that it would be the same for any of you. I used to preach that it
would, but in prison, when I thought of my folks standing up to be
killed, I thought perhaps I had gone beyond what was told me in
preaching that way; but as for me, I've seen and I've heard."

He did not turn or take restless steps upon the floor. It would have
been a relief to her if he had moved; but he remained just where he
first stood, strong enough to have this colloquy over without
restlessness.

"I am no saint," he said, "as you know very well, and there's a lot of
things I've done, thinking that my revelations told me, which I don't
know whether they told me or not, for in prison I saw that the things
were bad things, like that mess of the bank, and running away as I did.
I guess I could not have been living right, and the devil gulled me. But
that hain't got nothing to do with the times I know that the Lord spoke.
You don't believe it was the Lord at all. Well, then, who was it? For
it's the same as has told me not to do the lots of wicked things I might
have done and didn't. As to them plates, I told you before I didn't have
them as much in my hands as I said I did. I got wrong a bit there too,
maybe, but it isn't easy to keep quite straight between the thing you
see and the words you say it in, when you are trying to talk to people
about what they don't understand. It isn't easy to do just only what is
perfectly right about anything at any time, at least, if it is to you,
it isn't to me; but I often thought I was born worse than most people."

"The men who were your witnesses as to the reality of the plates are
apostate," she said gently.

"They are apostate," he said gloomily, "and why? Because I would not let
them live upon the Lord's tithes without labouring as we all laboured."

He spoke again after a moment. "The Gentiles have spread abroad a story
about one Solomon Spalding, who they say wrote the Book of Mormon, which
Rigdon stole, but you know--you who have been with us from the
beginning--that neither I nor your husband nor any one of us saw Rigdon
until we came to Kirtland, and if his word is to be believed he never
saw this Spalding or his boo