mother?  For persecuting the Saints of the most high God, this republic shall be dashed to pieces like a potter’s vessel.  But we shall be safe.  The Lord will gather Israel home to the chambers of the mountains against the day of wrath that is coming on the Gentile world.  For all flesh hath corrupted itself on the face of the earth, but the Saints shall possess a purified land, upon which there shall be no curse when the Lord cometh.  Then shall the heavens open—­”

He broke off, for the girl came leading in the son, who, as soon as he saw the white-haired old man with his open book, sitting beside the wasted woman on the bed, flew to them with a glad cry.

They embraced him and smoothed and patted him, tremulously, feebly, with broken thanks for his safe return.  The mother at last fell back upon her pillow, her eyes shining with the joy of a great relief, while the father was seized with a fit of coughing that cruelly racked his gaunt frame and left him weak but smiling.

The girl had been placing food upon the table.

“Come, Joel,” she urged, “you must eat—­we have all breakfasted, so you must sit alone, but we shall watch you.”

She pushed him into the chair and filled his plate, in spite of his protests.

“Not another word until you have eaten it all.”

“The very sight of it is enough.  I am not hungry.”

But she coaxed and commanded, with her hands upon his shoulders, and he let himself be persuaded to taste the bread and meat.  After a few mouthfuls, taken with obvious disrelish, she detected the awakening fervour of a famished man, and knew she would have to urge no more.

As the son ate, the girl busied herself at the mother’s pillow, while the father talked and ruminated by intervals,—­a text, a word of cheer to the wasted mother, incidents of old days, memories of early revivals.  In 1828, he had hailed Dylkes, the “Leatherwood God,” as the real Messiah.  Then he had been successively a Freewill Baptist, a Winebrennerian, a Universalist, a Disciple, and finally an eloquent and moving preacher in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Now he was a wild-eyed old dreamer with a high, narrow forehead depressed at the temples, enfeebled, living much in the past.  Once his voice would be low, as if he spoke only to himself; again it would rise in warning to an evil generation.

“The end of the world is at hand, laddie,” he began, after looking fondly at his son for a time.  “Joseph said there are those now living who shall not taste of death till Jesus comes.  And then, oh, then—­the great white day!  There is strong delusion among the wicked in the day in which we live, but the seed of Abraham, the royal seed, the blessed seed of the Lord, shall be told off to its separate glory.  The Lord will spread the curtains of Zion and gather it out to the fat valleys of Ephraim, and there, with resurrected bodies it shall possess the purified earth.  I shall be away for a time before then, laddie—­and the dear mother here.  Our crowns have been earned and will not long be withheld.  But you will be there for the glory of it, and who more deserves it?”