It is the low, small details of physical discomfort that make the bitterest part of the bread of sorrow.  Now and afterwards, through all the persecutions in which she shared, Susannah often felt this.  If she could have stood off and looked at the main issues of the battle she might have felt, even on the mere earthly plane, exaltation.  Yet one truth her experience confirmed—­that no human being who in his time and way has been hunted as the offscouring of the world—­no, not the noblest—­has ever had his martyrdom presented in a form that seemed to him majestic.  It is only those who bear persecution, not in its reality but in imagination, who can conceive of it thus.

All night the women were crowded together in the small inner room with the two sick babes, while Emma and two of the brethren performed the painful operation of taking the tar from Smith’s lacerated skin.  The prophet bore himself well.  Now and then, through the thin partition the watchers heard an involuntary groan, but he was firm in his determination to be clean of the pitch, and to preach as he had appointed the next day.

At dawn Susannah went to get her horse at Rigdon’s house.  The animal was safe.  When she had saddled it she inquired after the welfare of those within the house.  Rigdon was raving in delirium.  He had, it seemed, been dragged for some distance by his heels, his head trailing over stony ground.  They had not been able to remove the tar and feathers.  He lay upon a small bed in horrible condition.  His wife, with swollen eyes and pallid face, was sitting helpless upon the foot of the bed, worn out with vain efforts to soothe him.  His mother, a thin and dark old woman, vibrating with anathemas against his tormentors, led Susannah in and out of the room silently, as though to say, “This is the work of those whose virtue you extolled.”

The village, the low rolling hills about it, lay still in the glimmer of dawn.  The men of violence were sleeping as soundly, it seemed, as innocence may sleep.  The famous preacher, and all those souls that he had thrilled through and through for good and evil, were now wrapped in silence.  Susannah rode fast, guiding her horse on the grass by the roadside lest the sound of his hoofs should arouse some vicious mind to renewed wrath.  Her imagination, possessed by the scenes of the past night, presented to her lively fear for Halsey’s safety.  She gave her horse no peace; she thought nothing of her own fatigue until she had reached the Chagrin valley, and the walls of the Mormon temple which was being reared upon Kirtland Bluff were seen glistening in the sunlight, with the familiar outline of the wooden town surrounded by gray wreaths of the leafless nut woods.  It was high day, and the people were gathering for morning service when Susannah rode her jaded horse through the street of the lower village and up the hill of the Bluff.

As she lifted the latch of her own door Angel was about to come out to preach.  His face was very white and sad.  Susannah’s glad relief, fatigue, and excitement found vent in tears.