Twelve Mormon Homes : Twelve Mormon homes visited in succession on a journey through Utah to Arizona.

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 042

looks of a congregation of Mormon women. I was so placed that I had a good opportunity to look around, and began at once to seek for the "hopeless, dissatisfied, worn" expression travelers' books had bidden me read on their faces. But I found that they wore very much the same countenances as the American women of any large rustic and village congre- gation.26 As we grow older, most of us pass through trials enough to score their marks upon cheek and brow; but ill-health and ill- temper plough furrows quite as deep as guilt or misfortune. Take your own congregation, the sad histories of so many of whose members you know, and see whether you can read the tragedies of their lives beneath the composed Sunday expression their faces wear. Happy or unhappy, I could not read histories on the upturned faces at Nephi. I looked on old women's sun- burned and wrinkled visages, half-hidden in their clean sunbon- nets; decent, matronly countenances framed in big old-fashioned bonnets; bright, young eyes and rosy cheeks under coquettish round hats-you might see thousands of women resembling them in our countrv churches. 26The comments of Mark Twain seem appropriate on his views of Mormon women when he was in Utah in 1861. "With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth, I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here-until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically `homely' creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, `No-the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure -and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.' " Mark Twain, Rougking It (Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, I 872), pp. I I 7-18.