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

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 089

with deep feelings of the sufferings they endured when the crops, whose seed they had denied themselves bread to save, were devoured by the "army of grasshoppers sent to try their faith." All their feeble efforts to burn or drown or kill them failed before the presence of such vast numbers of the enemy. "The land was as a Garden of Eden before them, and a desolate wilderness behind them," he quoted, with rare appropriateness. On a Sunday morning he walked sorrowfully among his dy- ing fruit-trees, too heartsick to begin work again, but too much of a gardener to refrain altogether from using the hoe in his hand here and there. Elder John Taylor and two others came up, and said to him,- "Potteau, we can do nothing ourselves; there is no use in our working without God's blessing. If he chooses to take pity on us, our crops may be saved. He has commanded us to keep holy the Sabbath day, and Brother Brigham says we had better all come to meeting and pray." They did so. Then came the wind that brought the snow- white gulls, and they consumed the grasshoppers. The crops were saved, "and God," said he, "restored to us the years that the locust had eaten. And we know that He is in the midst of Israel, and is the Lord our God, and none else; and His people shall never be ashamed." (Joel ii. 27. This is a great chapter with the Mormons.) Why should not believers in special providences argue that the "keeping holy the Sabbath-day" prevented the gulls from being frightened away by human noises, and permitted them to do their work in peace?