's
why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the
devil that sends them; and it's not the devil, for I always work myself
up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come
after that if it was the devil?"

"What do you see?"

"I'll tell you one thing I have seen. Mebbe you'll know what it means;
mebbe you won't. I don't know myself rightly yet. I've often to study on
those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I've
seen you."

"Me?"

"Yes, you, miss. The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside
the stone. Your bonnet was off. You were inside a room. There was tables
and chairs, and there was a man there. He wasn't very old; he had light
hair."

"What had he to do with me?" she asked, astonished.

"I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own
heart seemed to say--"

"What?"

"It was one of my revelations. If I tell you, you won't believe it.
Howsomever, I think it's my duty to tell you, although you may tell your
folks, and they may persecute me." He paused here, and when he began
again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.
"The voice said, 'I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and
shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul;
and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her
to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and
grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and
honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.'"

As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the
sunlight, before her eyes.

Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing
remarkable about it. The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself,
and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start
from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion. That afternoon as she was
going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the
prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her
mind. In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in
childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision
within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad. She had never
heard of crystal-gazing; the phrase "mental automatism" had not then
been invented by the psychologists; still less could she suspect that
she herself might have