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

Gentile Account, page 154

the Promised Land with. She had her little boy with her whom she seated on her hand-cart or carried on her back when he was weary. She described her difficulties in procuring her pass- port to leave Russia where her family had used their influence to prevent her obtaining it, and her flight from home. Her two dear daughters however, bitterly opposed as they were to the Saints would, she had had it revealed to her, come out to Salt Lake to join her before she died. This lady spoke of visions miracles and gifts of healing by the Holy Spirit with a fervour of belief and a zeal one does not often meet with in these latter days. What can a morning-caller answer to a woman who says "Do you deny thepowel- of the Holy Spirit to do these things? I know you do not. Well, then, Madame, I, I that speak to you, have seen them. I know in whom I have believed!" Perhaps I might have explained in the course of an hour or two, why I could fully credit her truthfulness, and the actual occurrence of the circumstances she described without its affect- ing my own faith in my own creed in preference to hers. I do not think I would have attempted it however, for she was ever so much cleverer than myself and could have routed me in argument, "horse foot and dragoons." Besides my companion, a young Philadelph' ian, (whose handsome husband I always fancied had made her fall in love with Mormonism as embod- ied in himself, rather than from an abstract view of the beauty of the doctrines,) looked anxiously at me from time to time. She was wondering whether what I heard was to this Greek foolishness, and I wondered how far it was pure wisdom to key So I only bowed my head at intervals like the image of a 154