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Show 606 WESTERN WILDS. woman's baby," but nobody believes such charges; the character of Margaret is too well established. Saint and Gentile are willing to swear that her little girl is honestly entitled to the two hundredth part of that big estate. But there was one woman, Selina Ursenbach, who, could Brigham have won her, would have made it lively for Amelia. She was the sister of Octave Ursenbach, famous in Utah as the architect who de-signed the big organ in the Mormon Tabernacle. Brigham was in love for the thirtieth time, and his love was warm warmer than his youthful passion in a geometrical progression. Selina was a young, beautiful Swiss lady. She played on all musical instruments, and spoke the purest French. Brigham made himself a perfect dandy for her sake. She smiled on a young fellow, and Brigham sent him away on a mission. Then Selina got disgusted, apostatized from the Church, and went back to Switzerland. But if Brigham could have lived out his days, as nature intended, he might in turn have set aside Amelia, and gone on with the fifth generation of " wives " in the old style, as when in his prime his affection was a flowering annual, or semi- annual, blooming anew every spring and fall, and clinging to new supports each time. To conclude, those best informed sum up thus : Brigham had from first to last been actually married twenty- nine times; the largest num-ber of wives he ever had at one time was twenty- three, of whom fif-teen survive him. But he had been " sealed," on the' " spiritual wife" system, to quite a number of pious old ladies, with whom he had nothing to do in this world, but who are to be his in eternity ; and of his actual wives four belong to Joe Smith, having been the latter's at Nauvoo, and being destined for him in eternity. And do the women believe this sort of thing? asks an amazed reader. " Well, some of them do, and the rest fall in with the prevailing tendency of the society they move in, just as the majority of women do every- where. Take women as a mass, and that which is established is right. And right here I would protest against that arrant stupidity, so common in the East, that men alone are responsible for polygamy ; that the " poor women are the victims," and that women would, under cer-tain circumstances, put a stop to it. It is akin to that spurious and sickly sensibility of the French school ( see Victor Hugo and Wilkie Collins), which makes a prostitute the heroine of the drama; and has maudlin sentiment for " Mercy Merrick" and " Fantine," but sar-casm for the honest woman. It certainly requires no great amount of robust common sense to see that sexual sin requires two sinners |