About Christmas time there were a number of cases of illness in Kirtland.  Joseph Smith healed one woman, who appeared to be dying, by merely taking her by the hand, after praying, and commanding her to get up.  After that he went about with great confidence to others who were stricken, and in many cases health seemed to return with remarkable celerity.  It is hard to understand why the report of this, going abroad with such addition as gossip gives, should have greatly added to the rage of the members of other religious sects.  Perhaps they supposed that the prophet arrogated to himself powers that were even more than apostolic.  They threatened violence to Kirtland on the prophet’s account, so that before the new year he took Emma and the child and established himself with them in an obscure place called Hiram, some twenty miles to the south.  Sydney Rigdon, who by this time was, under the prophet, the chief leader of the Saints, went also to Hiram to be beside him.  Smith was toiling night and day to produce a new version of the Hebrew Scriptures, believing that he was taught by inspiration to correct errors in them.  Rigdon was scribe and reviser.  These two being absent from Kirtland, responsibility and work without limit rested again with Angel Halsey.

With unsatisfied affections and thoughts wholly perplexed, Susannah beheld the days of the new year lengthening.  Then she fell into the weakness, to which humanity is prone, of hoping eagerly for some external circumstance that should lighten the inner darkness.  A bit of stray news one day came to her with the shock of an apparent fulfilment of her vague expectation.  Finney was passing through that part of the country preaching.  Of all human beings she had ever met, this remarkable evangelist most impressed her as a man who had intimate dealing, awful, yet friendly, with an unseen power.  She had no sooner heard that he was within reach than her mind leaped to the determination to hear him preach and speak with him again.  She would lay her difficulties before him; she would hear from him more intelligence concerning the home which she had left than a thousand letters could convey.

It was March now.  The winter’s snow was gone.  Finney, as it chanced, was to come as near to Kirtland as the village of Hiram.  Susannah spoke to her husband.

“Did you hear that Mr. Finney was going to preach at Hiram?”

She stood turning from the white spread table in the centre of the room.  The morning light was shining on the satin surface of the planed maple wood with which walls and ceiling were lined.  Halsey was putting on his boots to go out to his day’s round of business and pastoral work.  He knew just as well as if she had explained it to him that a great deal lay behind what she said.  He fell to wondering at once what she could want.  Was it to send a message to the old home by the man whose very name must recall all its memories?

“I want to go and hear him preach,” Susannah went on.