One morning, a few weeks after he had reached home from the north, he received a call from Seth Wright.

“Here’s a letter Brother Brigham wanted me to be sure and give you,” said this good man.  “He said he didn’t know you was allowing to start back so soon, or he’d have seen you in person.”

He took the letter and glanced at the superscription, written in Brigham’s rather unformed but plain and very decided-looking hand.

“So you’ve been north, Brother Seth?  What do you think of Israel there?”

The views of the Wild Ram of the Mountains partook in certain ways of his own discouragement.

“Zion has run to seed, Brother Rae; the rank weeds of Babylon is a-goin’ to choke it out, root and branch!  We ain’t got no chance to live a pure and Godly life any longer, with railroads coming in, and Gentiles with their fancy contraptions.  It weakens the spirit, and it plays the very hob with the women.  Soon as they git up there now, and see them new styles from St. Looey or Chicago, they git downright daft.  No more homespun for ’em, no more valley tan, no more parched corn for coffee, nor beet molasses nor unbolted flour.  Oh, I know what I’m talkin’ about.”

The tone of the good man became as of one who remembers hurts put upon his own soul.  He continued: 

“You no sooner let a woman git out of the wagon there now than she’s crazy for a pink nubia, and a shell breastpin, and a dress-pattern, and a whole bolt of factory and a set of chiny cups and saucers and some of this here perfumery soap.  And that don’t do ’em.  Then they let out a yell for varnished rockin’-cheers with flowers painted all over ’em in different colours, and they tell you they got to have bristles carpet—­bristles on it that long, prob’ly!” The injured man indicated a length of some eighteen or twenty inches.

“Of course all them grand things would please our feelings, but they take a woman’s mind off of the Lord, and she neglects her work in the field, and then pretty soon the Lord gets mad and sics the Gentiles on to us again.  But I made my women toe the mark mighty quick, I told ’em they could all have one day a week to work out, and make a little pin-money, hoein’ potatoes or plantin’ corn or some such business, and every cent they earned that way they could squander on this here pink-and-blue soap, if they was a mind to; but not a York shilling of my money could they have for such persuasions of Satan—­not while we got plenty of soap-grease and wood-ashes to make lye of and a soap-kittle that cost four eighty-five, in the very Lord’s stronghold.  I dress my women comfortable and feed ’em well—­not much variety but plenty of, and I’ve done right by ’em as a husband, and I tell ’em if they want to be led away now into the sinful path of worldliness, why, I ain’t goin’ to have any ruthers about it at all!  But you be careful, Brother Rae, about turning your women loose in one of them ungodly stores up there.  That reminds me, you had Prudence up to Conference, and I guess you don’t know what that letter’s about.”