as felt in her rapid and unsteady step for many
and many a year.

One day, when the men were out cutting the maize, Susannah rode with her
uncle to the most distant of his fields, and found herself on the hill
called in Smith's revelation Cumorah.

The sound of the men at work and the horses shaking their harness was
close in her ears while she strayed over this bit of hilly woodland. It
is one of the low ridges that intersect the meadows on the banks of the
Canandaigua, and here Smith professed to have found the golden book. It
was because of this that Susannah had the curiosity to climb it now.

The beech wood grew thick upon it; the afternoon sun struck its slant
sunbeams across their boles. Once, where the beeches parted, she came
upon a fairy glade where two or three maples, fading early, had carpeted
the ground with a mosaic of gold and red, and were holding up the
remainder of their foliage, pink and yellow, in the light. The beauty
wrought in her a dreamy receptive mood. Climbing higher, she came upon a
very curious dip or hollow in the ground. In its narrowest part a man
was lying prostrate; his face was buried in his hat, which was lying
upon the ground between his hands; the whole expression of his body was
that of attention concentrated upon something within the hat. When she
came close he moved with a convulsive start, and she saw that it was
Joseph Smith.

His look changed into one of deference and satisfaction. He rose up,
lifting his hat carefully; in it lay a curious stone composed of bright
crystals, in shape not unlike a child's foot.

"It's my peepstone," he said. "It's the stone I look into when I pray
that I may be shown what to do." Exactly as one child might show to
another some worthless object he deemed choice, he showed the stone to
her.

"I don't know what you mean. How could a stone help you?"

"All I know is that when I've been lying for a long time, feeling that
I'm a poor fellow and haven't got no sense anyway, and the tears come to
my eyes and gush out, feeling I'm so poor and mean, then when I lie and
look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of
things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening
alongside of me that I didn't know any other way. I can't say how it may
be; I only know when I see it that I am 'accounted worthy.'"

"You couldn't see anything in the stone."

"No more I couldn't. The stone's nothing, an' I'm nothing, and that