I listened, intensely interested, to the conversation, quite content, for
my own part, to keep silence; but I caught Mrs. Barlow's eye fixed on me
as if in abstracted, beatific thought. Soon was made known the result of
her meditation. She had concluded that I was incapable of descending to
subjects of an ordinary nature. Leaning far forward on the table, with a
smile more ecstatic than any that had gone before, she directed these
words at me in a clear, swift-flowing treble:--
"Oh, ain't it dreadful about them poor delewded Mormons?"
"Why?" I exclaimed, involuntarily, blinded by the absolute unexpectedness
of the question, and not knowing, in a dearth of daily papers, but that
the infatuated people alluded to had been swallowed up of an earthquake,
or fallen in a body into the Great Salt Lake.
"Oh, nothing!" said Mrs. Barlow; "only I think it's dreadful, don't yew,
settin' such an example to Christian nations?"
"Dreadful! certainly!" I murmured, with intense relief, and allowed my
glasses to drop into my lap again.
Thus the conversation turned to subjects of a religious nature.
"Oh, I think it's so nice to have direct dealin's with the Almighty;
don't yew?" said Mrs.
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