The style of house most common in the village was long, low-roofed, of hewn logs, its front pierced by alternating doors and windows.  From the number of these might usually be inferred the owner’s current prospects for glory in the Kingdom; for behind each door would be a wife to exalt him, and to be exalted herself thereby in the sole way open to her, to thrones, dominion, and power in the celestial world.  There were many of these long, profusely doored houses; but many, too, of less external promise; of two doors or even one.  Yet in a hut of one door a well-wived Saint might be building up the Kingdom temporarily, until he could provide a more spacious setting for the several stars in his crown.

Then there was the capable Bishop Wright, whose long domestic barracks were the first toward the main road beyond Bishop Coltrin’s modest two-doored hut.  The Wild Ram of the Mountains, having lately been sealed to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end of the house,—­an apartment which was now being occupied, not without some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her enthusiasm for the Kingdom.  It had been her mischance to occupy previously in the community-house that apartment which the good man saw to be most suitable for his young and somewhat fastidious bride.  Not without makeshifts, indeed, many of which partook of this infelicity, was the celestial order of marriage to be obeyed and the world brought back to its primitive purity and innocence.

And of all persons in any degree distressed about these or other matters of faith, Joel Rae was made the first confidant and chief comforter.  In the case just cited, for example, Bishop Wright had confessed to him that, if anything could make him break asunder the cable of the Church of Christ, it would be the perplexity inevitable to a maintenance of domestic harmony under the celestial order.  The first wife also distressed this adviser with a moving tale of her expulsion from a comfortable room into the incommodious wagon-box.

Many of these confidences, as the days went by, he found spirit-grieving in the extreme, so that he was often weary and longed for refuge in a wilderness.  Yet he never failed to let fall some word that might be monitory or profitable to those who took him their troubles; nor did he forget to exult in these burdens that were put upon him, for he had resolved that his cross should be made as heavy as he could bear.