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Show Page 245 home. Godbe, an affable, bearded, smiling gentleman, was in New York buying warehouse stock for his large outlet in Zion, and offered Orson several hundred dollars in dry goods for his wives to sell in their homes. Godbe's generosity so excited Orson that he wrote instructions to the family on setting up a mercantile co-operative among themselves. Putting Marian in charge, he shipped on Godbe's train to Utah bales of shoes, laces, soaps and perfumes, combs, hoopskirts and "Fancy Head dresses" to be sold at 20 the "lowest Salt Lake prices." With the confidence of the tyro businessman, Orson donned his new broadcloth coat - another gift from a Salt Lake merchant - and lectured the London conference on Tottenham Court Road on the wars that would now befall with the conclusion of the conflict in America. He told them he had been sent personally to call the righteous out of the heart of spiritual Babylon, out of the great popish empires of the Continent. In his exhilaration, he informed Juliaet that he had let a few Lincoln-esque whiskers grow: "I am more fleshy than when I was in Utah. I am also letting my beard grow, and as all the front portions of if are white, it gives me quite a venerable and patriarchal appearance. My cheeks are a little more plump with flesh than they were, which somewhat adds to my good looks; upon the whole, I think you would fall in love with me if you could see me. Don't you think so?" 21 Crossing into the Continent for the first time, Orson took connections through the German states, which had closed their borders to Orson Spencer's proselytism in 1852, and went on toward toward Austria. This huge, polyglot empire welded together by the chains of Catholicism and the"Apostolic monarchy" of the Hapsburgs, had never heard the revelations of backwoods farmer Joseph Smith andentertained no desire to do so. The little white-bearded apostle who now shambled from one customs office to another received worse than a hostile reception - he got no attention at all. The government |