either divine or human; my father, for her
sake, determined to renounce his ambition and abjure his faith; and a
week had not passed upon the march before he had resigned from his
party, accepted the Mormon doctrine, and received the promise of my
mother's hand on the arrival of the party at Salt Lake.

The marriage took place, and I was its only offspring. My father
prospered exceedingly in his affairs, remained faithful to my mother;
and, though you may wonder to hear it, I believe there were few happier
homes in any country than that in which I saw the light and grew to
girlhood. We were, indeed, and in spite of all our wealth, avoided as
heretics and half-believers by the more precise and pious of the
faithful: Young himself, that formidable tyrant, was known to look
askance upon my father's riches; but of this I had no guess. I dwelt,
indeed, under the Mormon system, with perfect innocence and faith. Some
of our friends had many wives; but such was the custom; and why should
it surprise me more than marriage itself? From time to time one of our
rich acquaintances would disappear, his family be broken up, his wives
and houses shared among the elders of the church, and his memory only
recalled with bated breath and dreadful head-shakings. When I had been
very still, and my presence perhaps was forgotten, some such topic would
arise among my elders by the evening fire; I would see them draw the
closer together and look behind them with scared eyes; and I might
gather from their whisperings how some one, rich, honoured, healthy, and
in the prime of his days, some one, perhaps, who had taken me on his
knees a week before, had in one hour been spirited from home and family,
and vanished like an image from a mirror, leaving not a print behind. It
was terrible, indeed; but so was death, the universal law. And even if
the talk should wax still bolder, full of ominous silences and nods, and
I should hear named in a whisper the Destroying Angels, how was a child
to understand these mysteries? I heard of a Destroying Angel as some
more happy child might hear in England of a bishop or a rural dean, with
vague respect and without the wish for further information. Life
anywhere, in society as in nature, rests upon dread foundations; I
beheld safe roads, a garden blooming in the desert, pious people
crowding to worship; I was aware of my parents' tenderness and all the
harmless luxuries of my existence; and why should I pry beneath