A Gentile Account of Life in Utah's Dixie, 1872-73

Gentile Account, page 132

in the course of his travels had made an educated refined gentleman of himself. I do not know whether Love, converted his third wife, or whether she had been converted before he met her. All her family however were bitterly opposed to Mormonism. After her marriage she suffered much from her mother's feeling that the marriage was no marriage at all, and her first child's birth was followed by a long illness that almost deprived her of life and reason. She recovered a portion of health, but my informant said was killing herself in her eager absorbing devotion to her husband. "She had fairly bewitched him," this person-a woman of course-contemptuously said. "Every one knew that his former wives were neglected, though they managed his farm and attended to all their duties, and were twice as pretty and twice as healthy. He had neither eyes nor ears but for her." His missionary duties carried him on long and perilous journeys. She accompanied him everywhere when her health was entirely inadequate to it, and: (great enormity in Mormon eyes!) had once weaned her young infant, and left it and her other children to a sister's care, while she accompanied her husband across the Rocky Mountains. The censure of the Church was upon the infatuated pair, and it was thought she would stick at nothing in her effort to surround him with her love so entirely that his thoughts should never stray to the other wives. "Abra was ready ere he named her name, And if he called another Abra came.""* "XAbra was a favorite concubine of Solomon. These lines are from Matthew Prior's poem written in 1718 "Solomon on the Vanity of the World." William Rose Benet, Reader4 Encyclopediu (New York: Crowell and Company, 1948). 132