“I pray to be made worthy of the exaltation, Father.”

“You are, laddie.  The word and the light came to me when I preached another faith—­for the spirit of Thomas Campbell had aforetime moved me—­but you, laddie, you have been bred in the word and the truth.  The Lord, as a mark of his favour, has kept you from the contamination of doubters, infidels, heretics, and apostates.  You have been educated under the care of the priesthood, close here in Nauvoo the Beautiful, and who could more deserve the fulness of thrones, dominions, and of power—­who of all those whose number the after-time shall unfold?”

He turned appealingly to the mother, whose fevered eyes rested fondly upon her boy as she nodded confirmation of the words.

“Did he not march all the way from Kirtland to Missouri with us in ’34—­the youngest soldier in the whole army of Zion?  How old, laddie?—­twelve, was it?—­so he marched a hundred miles for every one of his little years—­and so valiant—­none more so—­begging us to hasten and give battle so he could fight upon the Lord’s side.  Twelve hundred miles he walked to put back in their homes the persecuted Saints of Jackson County.  But, ah!  There he saw liberty strangled in her sanctuary.  Do you mind, laddie, how in ’38 we were driven by the mob from Jackson across the river into Clay County? how they ran off our cattle, stole our grain? how your poor old mother’s mother died from exposure that night in the rain and sleet? how we lived on mast and corn, the winter, in tents and a few dugouts and rickety huts—­we who had the keys of St. Peter and the gifts of the apostolic age?  Do you mind the sackings and burnings at Adam-Ondi-Ahman?  Do you mind the wife of Joseph’s brother, Don Carlos, she that was made by the soldiers to wade Grand River with two helpless babes in her arms?  They would not even let her warm herself, before she started, at the flames of her own hut they had fired.  And, laddie, you mind Haun’s mill.  Ah, the bloody day!—­you were there, and one other, the sister, happy, beautiful as her in the Song of Songs, when the brutes came—­”

“Don’t, father—­stop there—­you are making my throat shut against the food.”

“Then you came to Far West in time to see Joseph and his brethren sold to the mobocrats by that devil’s traitor, Hinkle,—­you saw the fleeing Saints forced to leave their all, hunted out of Missouri into Illinois—­their houses burned, the cattle stolen, their wives and daughters—­”

“Don’t, father!  Be quiet again.  You and mother must be fit for our journey, as fit as we younger folk.”

He glanced fondly across the table, where the girl had leaned her chin in her hands to watch him, speculatively.  She avoided his eyes.

“Yes, yes,” assented the old man, “and you know of our persecutions here—­how we had to finish the temple with our arms by our sides, even as the faithful finished the walls of Jerusalem—­and how we were driven out by night—­”