it must make you often fancy that the others may be very important too, but it does not follow that they are, and, as you say, time will weed them out if you are trying to do right.”  She wondered if he would resent her ifs.  She stood looking down the bank in the short silence that followed, feeling somewhat timorous.  The steep ground was covered with the feathery sprays of asters, seen through a velvety host of gray teasles which grew to greater height.  Through the teasles the white and purple flowers showed as colours reflected in rippled water—­rich, soft, vague in outline.  At one side, by an old stump, there was a splendid feather, yellow and green, of fading golden rod; yellow butterflies, that looked as if they had dyed their wings in the light reflected from this flower, repeated its gold in glint and gleam over all the gray hillside, shot with the white and the blue.  At the foot of the bank lay the flat valley, and from this vantage ground the river could be seen.  The soft musical chat of its waters ascended to her ears, and among the huge bronze-leafed nut-trees, whose shelter she had just left, the woodpeckers were tapping and whistling to one another.

At length Smith sighed deeply, but without affectation.  “Yes, I reckon that’s a good deal how it is.  It ain’t easy, Mrs. Halsey—­I hope in your thoughts when judgin’ of me you’ll always remember that it ain’t easy to be a prophet.”

When he had gone, Susannah found herself laughing, but for Halsey’s sake the laughter was akin to tears.

CHAPTER III.

Ohio was being quickly settled.  Within a few miles of Kirtland, Cleveland and Paynesville were rising on the lake shore, and to the south there were numerous villages; but the society of the Saints at Kirtland was especially prosperous, and so sudden had been the increase of its numbers and its wealth that the wonder of the neighbouring settlers gave birth to envy, and envy intensified their religious hatred.  Twice before Smith had left Fayette he had been arrested and brought before a magistrate, accused of committing crimes of which the courts were unable to convict him.  Now the same spirit gave rise to the same accusations against his followers.  About this time webs of cloth were taken from a woollen mill near Paynesville, and several horses were also stolen.  The Mormons, whether guilty or not, were accused by common consent of the orthodox and irreligious part of the community.  Hatred of the adherents of the new sect began to rise in all the neighbouring country, as a ripple rises on the sea when the wind begins to blow; the growing wave broke here and there in little ebullitions of wrath, and still gained strength until it bid fair to surge high.