“Ah!” he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm.  “You differ greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward from the crime of their brothers’ blood.”

“I do indeed.”

“Still, they are excellent men.  Brother Heber Kimball and myself are every week invited to address a train of them down at Emigrant Square.  They are honest, peaceful people.  You call them ‘Copperheads,’ I believe.  But they are real, true, good men.  We find them very truth-seeking, remarkably open to conviction.  Many of them have stayed with us.  Thus the Lord makes the wrath of man to praise Him.  The Abolitionists—­the same people who interfered with our institutions, and drove us out into the wilderness—­interfered with the Southern institutions till they broke up the Union.  But it’s all coming out right,—­a great deal better than we could have arranged it for ourselves.  The men who flee from Abolitionist oppression come out here to our ark of refuge, and people the asylum of God’s chosen.  You’ll all be out here before long.  Your Union’s gone forever.  Fighting only makes matters worse.  When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home.”

There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and prosperous people abandoning, through abject terror of a desperate set of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an inaccessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham Young’s face glowing with what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest.  Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years,—­the more sanguine said, “next summer.”

At first sight, one point puzzled me.  Where were they to get the orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts?  My gentlemen-readers will feel highly nattered by a solution of this problem which I received from no leaser light of the Latter-Day Church than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.

“Why,” said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, “isn’t the Lord Almighty providin’ for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He anyways kin?  This war’s a-goin’ on till the biggest part o’ you male Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that’s left and comes a-fleein’ t’ our asylum ‘ll bring all the women o’ the nation along with ’em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on ’em all they want, and hev a large balance left over to distribute round among God’s saints that hez been here from the beginnin’ o’ the tribulation.”