“Seven women shall take a hold o’ one man!  There!” (with a slap on the back of the nearest subject for conversion).  “What d’ ye think o’ that?  Shall! Shall take a hold on him!  That don’t mean they sha’n’t, does it?  No!  God’s word means what it says.  And therefore means no otherwise,—­not in no way, shape, nor manner.  Not in no way, for He saith, ‘I am the way—­and the truth and the life.’  Not in no shape, for a man beholdeth his nat’ral shape in a glass; nor in no manner, for he straightway forgetteth what manner o’ man he was.  Seven women shall catch a hold on him.  And ef they shall, then they will!  For everything shall come to pass, and not one good word shall fall to the ground.  You who try to explain away the Scriptur’ would make it fig’rative.  But don’t come to ME with none o’ your spiritooalizers!  Not one good word shall fall.  Therefore seven shall not fall.  And ef seven shall catch a hold on him,—­and, as I jist proved, seven will catch a hold on him,—­then seven ought,—­and in the Latter-Day Glory, seven, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, ’Verily I say un-tew you, not seven, but seventy times seven,’ these seventy times seven shall catch a hold and cleave.  Blessed day!  For the end shall be even as the beginnin’, and seventy-fold more abundantly.  Come over into my garden.”

This invitation would wind up the homily.  We gladly accepted it, and I must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conversion, it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber’s fine orchard, eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound doctrine poked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums, to take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil.

Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every account of fearlessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the last thirteen years.  He is the chief of the Danites,—­a band of saints who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates.  If a Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his property into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the Lord’s treasury.  Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring way through the brains of external enemies.  They are the Heaven-elected assassins of Mormonism,—­the butchers by divine right.  Porter Rockwell has slain his forty men.  This is historical.  His probable private victims amount to as many more.  He wears his hair braided behind, and done up in a knot with a back-comb, like a woman’s.  He has a face full of bull-dog courage,—­but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait in it.  I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his society greatly,—­though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut my throat