though not as universally as was the case in the much desiderated Hebrew theocracy. The Crandalls were poor — Elder Salmudy was rich Hiram Polypeith was only a boy — Zilpha was an obedient daughter. She cried bitterly vowed she would always love Hiram — and married the multuxoriverous monster. As for Hiram - he gnashed his teeth in secret - that most helpless, uncommiserated, most laughed at of all human beings a boy indulging a hopeless passion. What could he have expected? He would not be ready to marry for years— Zilpha was a grown-up woman - did he suppose she was to be bound by the plays of a baby-house? Pshaw! So he crawled into the straw of his father's barn and wept out his heart-break, not even pitied by the hen whom his grief had driven off her nest on the beam, and who scolded at him with the crossest of cackles. Time will insist on healing such wounds for us though we swear he shall not, and despise ourselves as brutes for finally yielding to him. What was at first the bitterest ingredient in the boy's cup- the fact that his little Zilpha lived next door to him in his successful rival's house became a sort of sad delight — gradually a delight with only a faint soupçon of sadness, for he saw a great deal of her without the elder, and cherished in his heart that fearful torpedo, liable to explode at any moment, the old love for her without the old right. Just as he was beginning to go about his work with some sort of equanimity, and to answer the criterion which old country women suppose infallible for the question whether a hopeless passion exists or not, by "taking his three meals reg'lar," Salmudy received the mandate to depart. Hiram could{ have gone to Brigham Young and hugged him round the knees! It almost seemed as if the President had known his heart and intended to do him a personal favor. He did not dare to accompany his father to the stage office, lest instinct should be too strong for conventionalism, and the real sunshine of his heart at Elder Salmudy's parting break through the hypocritical clouds upon his face. So he stayed at home, hiding in the barn, and through a knot-hole saw with a quickened pulse of delight little Zilpha feeding her chickens from the back porch - heard her sing-ing blithely while she scattered the crumbs as light-hearted as if it were indifferent to her whether her six-months' lord went to Copenhagen or Jericho, and it would be quite the same to her if he never came back from: either. Already he began to calculate the chances against the elder's return his years were against him; the journey was full of exposures; there were several sea-voyages to make; the ocean baffled, there were still the Sioux, the Arrapahoes, and the Snakes on the way across Plain and Mountain - he blushed, catching himself suddenly, just about to enter a chamber of thought which was the vestibule of murder. Papa Polypeith's promise to keep a fatherly eye on the bereaved Salmudys gave Hiram constant occasion to run in next door. He went to see if his mother could help them; if there was butter wanted; if the flour was getting low; if the cattle were getting on nicely; if his father could transact any business for them; if they wouldn't like to read the last New York papers; if the flower-beds needed weeding; if he could do anything; if anything was wanted - yes! something was wanted wanted all the time, by one of that household. And O! perilous gift! - he brought it brought all the strong, passionate, flaming love which he fancied he had raked out and buried under the love which by God's law was his right and hers to whom he gave it, though man had set on it his black seal of execration. Neither knew when it came. The curves of danger are so gradual its inclines so smooth. The two thought they were reviving innocent childhood's playtime. They sat under the acacias as of old; they talked of the houses he made for her to live in, and laughed at their babyhousekeeping. Did she remember when he stood in this cedar clump to be married to her with a big doll for a bridesmaid? did he remember what he did as soon as the ceremony was over? She blushed as she recalled it and dropped her moist eyes; he folded her to his heart and did it again. But they did not feel as they had in childhood — their lips parted slower — his arm was harder to unclasp. Day after day of delicious dreamy peril went on, in house and garden - part of it right before the eyes of the parental Polypeiths; but they, remembering what attached playmates the children had been, and like all parents so slow to realize the fact that their child could grow up, saw the two walking and talking together, saw them inseparable in their studies, their amusements, even their work, so far as they could help each other, and never warned them of a danger that they themselves did not suspect. Other eyes, however, were not so fondly blind. The other four wives of the elder had never been one with that excellent man in his admiration for Zilpha. One of them, moreover, was the spiritual wife of the bishop of that ward, and on more than one occasion had shown her devotion to the Church and to the man who should be her husband in the celestial mansions, by acting as eyes for him and the Vehm-Gericht. She was bound by the holiest of ties, therefore, to let no iniquity pass her scrutiny without revealing it directly to the bishop. Within the first month after her earthly husband's departure she had repaired to the house of her spiritual one, and told him that she saw mischief hatching. His only reply was, "Watch." So she did watch. As for the other three, their feeling toward the pretty little Zilpha was of a less tragic and religious -nature; they hated her and waited to catch her tripping because they were unpleasantly homely; had long and slabby or stocky and dumpy figures; were without grace or womanly development in either spirit or physique; were bald, sallow, wrinkled, uneducated, uncouth, while in every particular she had the impudence to be exactly the reverse; because no handsome young man came to console them for the absence of Brother Salmudy, therefore they hated her with that poisonous petty hate which nothing can create in a woman but the degradation to which she has always been subject in a theocracy. Thus, both the Church and Personal Jealousy - Artificial Evil and Native Evil - were arrayed against the two young lovers, and searched out their most secret communings, their most intricate paths, with fiery eyes that never drooped in weariness or were damped by pity. Yet the lovers, wrapped in the isolation of that heavenly dream which made them the two only human beings in the universe, toyed on like mating wrens, just over the fanged jaws of the blacksnake. As innocent of evil intent as Francesca da Rimini and her lover, the two thought of nothing but the fact that they loved. They knew that they were each other's they had no room, no politic coolness for the thought how to get it acknowledged that they were. They talked as if life were to be all an endless now; as if Time were put to sleep for them, Age forbidden to approach them, the world banished from them, the elder never coming back from Copenhagen. What they would do when he did come back, was a thought which seemed so far away, that to have roused them to it from their trance of love would have seemed an impertinence of the same kind as waking a man from the middle of his night's sleep to decide the choice of a name or a profession for his great-greatgreat grandson. They did not even reflect that Brigham was noted for his urbanity and kindness to unequally yoked wives, and that Zilpha's 'unhappy lot might be changed in an hour by going to his office with her story as soon as the elder returned and had a chance to be notified of her wish for the separation, so that he should not feel as if a trap had been sprung on him. Marriage they did not think of, for in the childhood with which their present lotus-eating life was continuous, had they not been married dozens of times? How many times we tell lovers to be prudent prudent even if only for the sake of their love! But who obeys who can obey that mandate? There is something in love itself which takes policy out of the most politic head and floods the veins with childlike heedlessness. Love is so necessary to the lover's exist ence -so vital an air to him, that it seems as if all around him must be loving too, and if so, that they can have no time and as little heart, to meddle with his happiness. One night, Zilpha stole out by the kitchen and the back porch, from the glum society of her four elder "sisters." Two of them were busily engaged in rocking separate cradles, each containing a young Salmudy of nearly the same age; another was knitting stockings for her part of the family feet; and another was reading the "Deseret News'" report of Brother Brigham's last sermon, which a face-ache had kept her from hearing with her fleshly ears. Such of the children as were not married and permanently out of the house, or in the cradles biting the gum ring of infancy, were either in bed up-stairs in a sort of phalansterian nursery, or out in town somewhere at social or religious meetings, or engaged ir the favorite rural occupation of New England male-evenings, which has survived the transit of the Rocky Mountains, seated around a stove with their feet on the fender ring, squirting tobacco juice between the legs, or joining with idiomatic old men in muzzy fur caps, talking politics and relating reminiscences. The women folks and the one inadequate astral lamp on the centre-table seemed one and all to need fresh filling if they were ever to be expected to shed light on anything, and diffused about them such an atmosphere of dejection that one would think they might have sufficiently well understood why a bright little girl like Zilpha could not stand it any longer in the room with them. Evidently, however, the tallest and stiffest sister could not accept these facts as sufficient to ac count for Zilpha's retreat, since she folded up her "Deseret News" with spinster-like precision, and followed the junior wife out like a chaperone. She was too late to find her in the kitchen or on the porch. The moon was at its second quarter and shed the peculiar, uncertain lunar twilight characteristic of that phase; melting into each other the lines which at the planet's full come out silver-edged and distinct as strands of filagree; the very light for lover's meetings, since it does not betray them to their enemies like the broader radiance, but tinges their faces to each other with a sweet enamoring mystery, and reveals them with a tender half-disclosure which leaves room for the imagination, always delighting in the adornment of the beloved with its own ideals, to make every feature and expression thrice beautiful, thus giving a new meaning to the poet's words, "As darkness shows us worlds of light After the elder girt his loins and fared on his mission, Hiram had constructed a little wicket in the fence between the Salmudys' and his father's garden like that which existed on the side toward the Crandalls. Toward this, through the half-moonlight, Zilpha made her way. Hiram stood ready to open it for her. He led her in, latched it after her, put his arm around her waist, and led her down the gravel walk to the shade of the acacias. For an hour they sat murmuring into each other's ears the sweetest words that are ever spoken on earth; they forgot time, space, earth, all but the heaven of an immeasurable love that even on the outer sill of its vestibule had no place for an elder of fifty with four other wives. Before the last good-night embrace, a pair of those red, vengeful eyes, by aid of which the Church is omniscient, turned away from the sight of the young lovers' rapture, which for the last half-hour they had been burning through the shrubbery to mark and chronicle. They turned away, and a pair of stealthy, cat-like feet with them, just in time; for, stricken with sudden consciousness, and thinking that they heard a noise near the house, the two arose from beneath the shadow of the acacia, and hastened to the wicket. Just in time, for as they reached it, a gaunt dark figure unseen by them, got safely within the screening dark ness of the elder's back porch. After breakfast the next morning, the lady who was reading the " Deseret News" on the night before, called upon the bishop of the ward, who complaisantly granted her an hour's private interview. All such readers as are too sensitive or squeamish to bear the whole truth regarding Mormonism, whatever depths of moral ugliness it may disclose, will please dismount from my narrative at this stoppingplace; and, while I pursue the main road, cross the stile, and make a short cut by turning over a leaf, to meet me and get aboard again a few paragraphs on. Neither Zilpha nor Hiram know that their secret has been discovered. The former goes on with his business, the latter performs her share in the household duties of the absent elder's ménage - - they both meet and part as blithely as ever. To be sure, the young girl sees sour looks following her every where from those whom it is a Mormon "triumph of grace" to call "sisters"; but then she always received those, and having at the commencement made up her mind to pay no attention to them, is not now troubled by the question of more or less. As for Hiram, neither in human face, nor word, nor deed neither in his own thought, nor in outside warning- is there anything to tell him that the Philistines are upon him. Now it is the full of the moon — a fortnight after that sweet secret meeting under the acacias—and he has a long walk to take for the assistance of his father's business. Old Brother Polypeith has to pay a note to-morrow, and Hiram must go on a collecting tour to the outskirts of Salt Lake City on the Camp Floyd Road. He promises the old couple that he will be back by eleven o'clock at the furthest. They need not sit up for him after that. If he comes back later, he will stop at a friend's of his who lives on the southern suburb. He carries nothing with him but his locust-switch, a mere sapling, not for use, but for ornament; his revolvers are left behind, hanging at the head of his bedstead why should he take any weapon? He has no personal enemies, and it is the Mormon's boast that Salt Lake City is safer after dark than any town of its size east of the Rocky Mountains. Moreover, the full moon makes it as light as day, and if, in all the Mormon Zion, there could be such a lusus naturæ as a robber or an assassin, he certainly would not select this time of the month to ply his nefarious trade. If he whistles as he walks, therefore, it is because he remembers a favorite tune which Zilpha used to sing under the acacia when the "Mormonicles" and "Mormoniculesses" were married in play : "Thus the farmer sows his seeds; He stands erect and takes his ease, The air is full of blithe influences. He walks as if by will, without |