to me at the moment.  My “friend” asked me with a keen glance where I had read it, and at once I recollected those open books and understood the position, resolving mischievously to outflank the manaeuverer.  Accordingly, at each opportunity, with seeming innocence, I “wiped his eye,” as they say at a battue, and certainly reaped the anecdotic “kudos” Mr. So-and-so had cunningly contrived and hoped to achieve for himself.  I confess it was vicious of me, but who could help taking the benefit of such a chance?  Hosts should beware of wits who cram their jokes and anecdotes.  Years after I met the same gentleman at another entertainer’s table, where I found him in my presence not quite the livener-up they had expected, and he seemed a little shy of me; probably he thought me an omniscient, for I never told the poor man I had found him out.  I fear he has departed to a world where genuine truthfulness is more accepted as a virtue than in this.

A Mormon Guest.

Quite recently I have had a visit from a young American, who brought me a letter from a so-called cousin—­at all events a namesake—­in the Far West, asking me to tell her about her German ancestry.  My visitor was good-looking, well-dressed, fair-spoken, and gentlemanly; also well-bred and well-to-do.  I will not indicate his name, but I may state that he is a near relative of the eminent electrician who illuminates so magnificently the fountains at South Kensington.  Of course, as pleased with his manners and deportment, I kept him to luncheon; and finding that he hailed from Utah, naturally asked if he knew Salt Lake City and the Mormons there.  Certainly; he lived not a hundred miles from the city, and those were his own people:  as a Mormon himself from infancy, he had nothing but good to say of them, and we in England had been very much misled by Mrs. Stenhouse and other travellers.  As to plurality of wives, not two per cent. of their whole 200,000 had more than one wife.  His own father, a rich merchant and a church-hierarch, a “stake” of the tabernacle (much as we should say a pillar), had but one—­his own dear mother—­and he scarcely knew any one with more.  It was quite a European misjudgment that many followed Brigham Young’s doctrine, which never had been Joseph Smith’s,—­and the present chief, Taylor, had but one.  He showed us many cabinet photographs of Salt Lake City, his own family, leading Mormons, and the like:  especially of the Old Tabernacle, like a monstrous tortoise, and one from a finished drawing of the new, of even more tasteless architecture, being the most gigantic piece of perpendicular ever perpetrated, and full of unsightly windows.  When asked about the golden book,—­well he had never seen it, but believed in it thoroughly; because all the twelve apostles had seen it and he trusted their testimony.  Eleven of those apostles were now dead, one only surviving. (Just as with our friends of Mr. Irving’s sect at Albury, which arose in the same year as Mormonism.) We had never set eyes on the originals of our own Scriptures—­in fact, they did not exist—­but believed the witnessing of others, as he did.  He himself was not a missionary, but would go if he was sent by the Church; though he mightn’t like it, he was bound to, obey, authority, &c. &c.