“All I know is that when I’ve been lying for a long time, feeling that I’m a poor fellow and haven’t got no sense anyway, and the tears come to my eyes and gush out, feeling I’m so poor and mean, then when I lie and look and look into this peepstone, I see things in it, pictures of things that is to be, and sometimes of things that are just happening alongside of me that I didn’t know any other way.  I can’t say how it may be; I only know when I see it that I am ‘accounted worthy.’”

“You couldn’t see anything in the stone.”

“No more I couldn’t.  The stone’s nothing, an’ I’m nothing, and that’s why, when I do see the pictures, I know it must be either God or the devil that sends them; and it’s not the devil, for I always work myself up to a mighty lot of praying first, and why should the pictures come after that if it was the devil?”

“What do you see?”

“I’ll tell you one thing I have seen.  Mebbe you’ll know what it means; mebbe you won’t.  I don’t know myself rightly yet.  I’ve often to study on those things a long while before I know what they mean, but lately I’ve seen you.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you, miss.  The things I see are like small tiny pictures inside the stone.  Your bonnet was off.  You were inside a room.  There was tables and chairs, and there was a man there.  He wasn’t very old; he had light hair.”

“What had he to do with me?” she asked, astonished.

“I just saw you stand there, and him a-sitting, but a voice in my own heart seemed to say—­”

“What?”

“It was one of my revelations.  If I tell you, you won’t believe it.  Howsomever, I think it’s my duty to tell you, although you may tell your folks, and they may persecute me.”  He paused here, and when he began again it was in a different tone of voice and with a singing cadence.  “The voice said, ’I say unto thee, she shall see the white stone, and shall be told the thing that she shall do for the salvation of her soul; and I say unto thee, Joseph Smith junior, that thou shalt say unto her to look upon the stone, for she is chosen to go through suffering and grief for a little space, and after that to have great riches and honour, and in the world to come life everlasting.’”

As he spoke he was holding up the stone, which glistened in the sunlight, before her eyes.

Susannah stared at it to prove to herself that there was nothing remarkable about it.  The feeling of opposition seemed to die of itself, and then she had a curious sensation of arousing herself with a start from a fixed posture and momentary oblivion.  That afternoon as she was going home, and in the following days, phrases and sentences from the prophecy which Joseph Smith had pronounced in regard to her clung to her mind.  In disdain she tried to tell herself that the man was mad; in childlike wonder she considered what might be the mystery of the vision within the stone and the prophecy if he were not mad.  She