A female relative of Halsey, having lost her friends by death, came from the east to Kirtland upon his invitation.

Susannah went down the hill one summer day to meet the travelling company of new converts which brought Elvira Halsey.  That young lady had seen about twenty-five years of life’s vicissitudes, and had sharpened her wits thereon.  Slight, pretty, and dressed with an effort at fashion that was quite astonishing in the Kirtland settlement, Elvira sprang from the waggon.

“I’ve come to be a Mormon.  How do you begin?” With these words she presented to Susannah a new type of character, fresh, and in some ways delightful.

There was quite a crowd at the stopping place of the waggons.  Halsey, with other elders and Smith, came to welcome the newcomer.  Elvira stood on tip-toe, peeping about, pressing Susannah’s arm with whispers.  “Which is Joe Smith, do tell me?  Do you go down on your knees to him, and does he pat your head?”

Guided by keen instinct, Elvira did not make remarks in Halsey’s hearing which would have shocked him, but perhaps by the same instinct she at once claimed Susannah as a confidante in spite of some feeble remonstrance.

“Are you not wrong to speak so lightly of our religion?” asked Susannah, feeling that she was an elder’s wife.

“First let me be sure that you have any religion to speak of.”  She looked up prettily in Susannah’s face.  “What a beautiful creature you are!” she cried.  “And is it to please my cousin Angel that you wear a snuff-coloured dress and a white cap and a neckerchief like an old lady of seventy?”

As they proceeded together up the white curving road, over the crest of the verdant bluff, Elvira announced her further intentions.

“I am not going to live with you.  I am going to board with the Smiths.  I want to get to the bottom of this business, and see the apparitions myself.”

“There are no apparitions,” said Susannah gently.

“Gold books, you know, flying about in the air, and the angel Maroni and hosts of the slain Lamanites.”

“You expect too much.  Such visions as Mr. Smith had came but at the beginning to attest his mission and give him confidence.”

“Tut!  I should think he had sufficient of that commodity.  It is I who require the confidence, and have I come too late?”

“I would question, if it did not appear unkind, why you have come at all?”

“Bless you, it’s relations, not revelations, that I came after.”

“I fear that Angel will not be satisfied with that attitude,” Susannah sighed.  She supposed that Elvira represented all too well the attitude of educated minds in that far-off world whose existence she tried to forget.

“Therefore,” said Elvira, “I will board with the Smiths.”

Elvira’s whim to be received into the prophet’s family could not be carried out, but by persistency she succeeded in establishing herself in the household of Hyrum Smith, where she distinguished herself by two peculiarities—­a refusal to marry any of the saintly bachelors who were proposed to her, and a perpetual good-natured delight in all that she saw and heard.  She resisted baptism, but to Susannah’s surprise, remained on perfectly friendly terms with the leaders of the sect.