When hearts, whose truth was proven
    Like thine, are laid in earth,
  There should a wreath be woven
    To tell the world their worth;

  And I, who woke each morrow
    To clasp thy hand in mine,
  Who shared thy joy and sorrow,
    Whose weal and woe were thine—­

  It should be mine to braid it
    Around thy faded brow;
  But I’ve in vain essayed it,
    And feel I cannot now.

  While memory bids me weep thee,
    Nor thoughts nor words are free,
  The grief is fixed too deeply
    That mourns a man like thee.

CHARLES FARRAR BROWNE.

[From Lecture on the Mormons.]

Brother Kimball is a gay and festive cuss, of some seventy summers, or some’er’s there about.  He has one thousand head of cattle and a hundred head of wives.  He says they are awful eaters.

Mr. Kimball had a son, a lovely young man, who was married to ten interesting wives.  But one day while he was absent from home these ten wives went out walking with a handsome young man, which so enraged Mr. Kimball’s son—­which made Mr. Kimball’a son so jealous—­that he shot himself with a horse-pistol.

The doctor who attended him—­a very scientific man—­informed me that the bullet entered the parallelogram of his diaphragmatic thorax, superinducing hemorrhage in the outer cuticle of his basilicon thaumaturgist.  It killed him.  I should have thought it would.

(Soft Music.)

I hope this sad end will be a warning to all young wives who go out walking with handsome young men.  Mr. Kimball’s son is now no more.  He sleeps beneath the cypress, the myrtle, and the willow.  The music is a dirge by the eminent pianist for Mr. Kimball’s son.  He died by request.

I regret to say that efforts were made to make a Mormon of me while I was in Utah.

It was leap-year when I was there, and seventeen young widows, the wives of a deceased Mormon, offered me their hearts and hands.  I called on them one day, and, taking their soft white hands in mine, which made eighteen hands altogether, I found them in tears, and I said, “Why is this thus?  What is the reason of this thusness?”

They hove a sigh—­seventeen sighs of different size.  They said: 

“O, soon thou wilt be gonested away!”

I told them that when I got ready to leave a place I wentested.

They said, “Doth not like us?”

I said, “I doth—­I doth.”

I also said, “I hope your intentions are honorable, as I am a lone child, my parents being far—­far away.”

Then they said, “Wilt not marry us?”

I said, “O, no, it cannot was!”

Again they asked me to marry them, and again I declined, when they cried,

“O, cruel man! this is too much!  O, too much!”

I told them that it was on account of the muchness that I declined. . . .