Mrs. Yellett looked towards the mountain-range that separated her from the Mormon country, and her listeners realized that she was verging perilously close to confidences.  Mary Carmichael, who dreaded missing any detail of the chronicle that dealt with paw in the role of apocryphal duke, hastened to say: 

“And you lost your taste for romance, finally?”

“In Salt Lake I was left to myself a whole lot-there was reasons why I didn’t mingle with the Mormon herd.  Paw was mighty attentive to me, but them was troublous times for paw.  I pastures myself with the fleetin’ figures of romance the endoorin’ time and enjoys myself a heap.  When paw wasn’t a dook or a pirate king, unbeknownst to himself, like as not he was Sir Marmaduke Trevelyun, or somebody entitled to the same amount of dog.

“’Bout this time a little stranger was due in our midst, and the woman who came to take care of me was plumb locoed over novels, same as me, only worse.  She just hungered for ’em, same as if she had a longin’ for something out of season.  She brought a batch of them with her in her trunk, we borrowed her a lot more, some I don’t know how she come by.  But they didn’t have no effect; it was like feedin’ an’ Injun—­you couldn’t strike bottom.  She read out of ’em to me with disastrous results happenin’, an’ that cured me.  The brand on this here book that effected my change of heart was The Bride of the Tomb.  I forget the name of the girl in that romance, but she was in hard luck from the start.  She couldn’t head off the man pursooin’ her, any way she turned.  She’d wheel out of his way cl’ar across country, but he’d land thar fust an’ wait for her, a smile on his satanine feachers.

“I got so wrought up along o’ that book, an’ worried as to the outcome, ‘most as bad as the girl.  Think of it!  An’ me with only three baby-shirts an’ a flannel petticoat made at the time!  Seemed ’s if I couldn’t hustle my meals fast enough, I just hankered so to know what was goin’ to happen next!  I plumb detested the man with the handsome feachers, same as the girl.  Me an’ her felt precisely alike about him.  And when he shut her up in the family vault I just giv’ up an’ was took then an’ there, an’ me without so much as finishin’ the flannel petticoat!  I never could endure the sight of a novel since.  Perhaps that’s why Ben is so dumb about his books—­just holds a nacheral grudge against ’em along of my havin’ to borrow slips for him.”

“Has the Book of Hiram anything to say against the habit of novel reading, Mrs. Yellett?” inquired Judith, demurely.

She paused for a moment.  “It’s mighty inconvenient that I should have mislaid that book, but rounding up my recollections of it, I recall something like this:  ‘Romance is the loco-weed of humanity.’”

“So you don’t approve of the Mormon Bible?” ventured Mary.

“I jest nacherally execrates Mormonism, spoken, printed, or in action,” she said, with an emphasis that suggested the subject had a strong personal bearing.  “I recall a text from the Book of Hiram touching on Mormon deportment in particklar an’ human nature at large.  It says, ’Where several women and one man are gathered together for the purpose of serving the Lord, the man gets the bulk of the service.”