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Show Page 164 preside over all the conferences and all affairs of the ...Saints in the British Islands and adjacent countries...his family should accompany Q him if he chooses." Sarah chose, and on a May morning, she and Orson and three children stepped aboard the Missouri steamer "Mandon" which called at Kanesville. Orson carried with him a certificate from Brigham Young: "...the bearer, Elder Orson Pratt, A.M. Professor of Mathematics and member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, is a gentleman of sterling integrity and unblemished character, and is delegated by the authorities... to solicit and receive donations in money, books, and apparatus for establishing an endowment of an observatory of the first order, at the Great Salt Lake City..." 9 No doubt this last item of business was Orson's project. This was to be Sarah's first crossing of the Atlantic, and she suffered severely for it - she was three months from delivering her seventh child. On July 20, 1848, as they docked in Liverpool, the Saints met them and sorrowed over her condition; the mission home at 15 Wilton Street provided comfortable quarters, however, and Sarah discovered the pleasures of having a serving girl for the first time in her life. A Scottish girl of nineteen, Marian Ross, had worked in the office since her baptism a year before, and soon became deeply attached to both Orson and Sarah. This was the little girl, grown up, who had dreamed of Orson Pratt, the night before she met him, when she was ten years old. Orson now sent to the Mormons of Britain to meet in conference, convening at the Manchester Music Hall on August 13. For the first time, hundreds of British workmen captivated by Joseph Smith's restoration stirred inside at the epic of gathering, and maybe just a little at the prospect of land to be had for the taking. Orson sweated for their tifhing; after constant harangues and articles in the Star, money began to trickle for the sustenance of Mormons shuffling across the distant American steppes. And for the temple, for the observatory (which he would finally get in two |