“Why should I take the trouble to help you and the young un?” she asked, sitting on Susannah’s doorstep, languid with the heat.  “When I was going along the lane last night I met a spirit, so I held out my hand according to Joe’s latest.  You’ve not heard!  My! it’s in the Millenial Star that if any sort of a voice or dream comes to you, the way to know, whether it’s an angel or devil is to shake hands, and if it is an angel you’ll feel a good, firm, solid grip sort of coming out of nowhere, but if it isn’t an angel you’ll feel nothing.  It’s kind of Joe to put it in a nutshell, necessary nowadays that we’re all hard at it having revelations of our own.  He thought that nobody would feel the grip but himself.  Quite mistaken.  I shook hands with my angel, tho’ I couldn’t see a ghost of him, and when he said, ’You come along now to Missouri, and carry the child half way,’ I had nothing to do but say ‘Amen.’”

But Susannah was too much afraid of what the result of private revelations might be to laugh at them; she expressed her fears.

“Bless you, all the dreams and ‘voices’ in this hustling world wouldn’t have put any guile into the soul of Nathaniel, and they won’t into Angel Halsey’s.  Saints are saints, sinners are sinners, middling folks are middling, just the same whether they have three ‘revelations’ a day apiece, or one once a year, or none at all.  You’re fretting because you think a righteous man might do something wicked, thinking that the voice of the Lord had told him.  Not a bit of it!  The Lord will take care of his own when they’re a little off their heads just as much as at any other time.”

What few worldly goods Susannah chose to keep were packed in two single waggons, Halsey driving the one, and Elvira and Susannah by turns driving the other and holding the child.  Their long journey through the month of June was the most perfect pleasure that Susannah and Angel ever enjoyed together, the long nightmare of the last months at Kirtland left behind for ever, the stage of the future veiled, and the lineaments of natural hope painted upon the drop-curtain.  A loving fate sent fresh showers on their behoof during the nights, which laid the dust and dressed field and forest in their daintiest array.  The child, who had been pining somewhat, affected by the anxiety in the Kirtland home, became lusty and merry.

“If it wasn’t that we are shortly going to be robbed of all we possess by the Missourians,” observed Elvira, “this sort of jog-trot comfort would become too monotonous, but it adds spice to be saying, so to speak, ‘Hulloa there! we’ve come to be persecuted too.’  Of course we’ll all be killed to begin with, but that’s a detail; after that we’ll take our rural mission bespoken for us in the dream.”

Susannah actually smiled and called “gee-up” to the horse.

“How very little people know,” she observed, “who talk about a persecution as if it would be a means of grace.  There is nothing that so hardens and degrades as the constant report of barbarities; the more nearly seen, the more closely inspected, the worse is the moral result.”