Green as I was to saintly manners, I supposed that one of these two young mothers had run in from a neighbor’s to compare babies with the mistress of the house, after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners of juvenile phenomena.  When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both of the young girls addressed her as “mother,” I was emboldened to tell her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.

“They are pretty,” said the old lady, demurely; “but they are the children of my son”; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and heels into Mormon realities at once, she added,—­“Those young ladies are the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool,—­young Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball’s wife.”

A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical workings.  I stared,—­I believe I blushed a little,—­I tried to stutter a reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost, so that I felt they must read it in my face, was, “How can these young women sit looking at each other’s babies without flying into each other’s faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other’s hair?” Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying that it was a triumph of grace.

Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself.  She was a woman of remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have been the oracle of tea-fights, the ruling spirit of donation-visits, in any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief Directress’s chair of half a dozen Woman’s Aid Societies and Associations for Moral Reform.  Yet here was this strong-minded woman, as her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and right-hand helper through a married life reaching into middle-age, witnessing her property in that husband’s affections subdivided and parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the approbation of her intellect.  Though few first wives in Utah had learned to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and vigorous-natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent.  She was one of the strangest psychological problems I ever met.  Indeed, I am half inclined to think that she embraced Mormonism earlier than her husband, and, by taking the initiative, secured for herself the only true wifely place in the harem,—­the marital after-thoughts of Brother Heber being her servants rather than her sisters.  She was most unmistakably his favorite.

One day in the Opera-House at Salt Lake, when the carpenters were laying the floor for the Fourth-of-July-Eve Ball, Heber and I got talking of the pot-pourri of nationalities assembled in Utah.  Heber waxed unctuously benevolent, and expressed his affection for each succeeding race as fast as mentioned.