in a land of liberty!” 

 “State of Illinois, U.S.A., September 19, 1846—but what of that? We’re the Lord’s chosen, and over yender is a generation of vipers warned to flee from the wrath to come. But they won’t flee, and so we’re outcasts for the present, driven forth like snakes. The best American blood is in our veins. We’re Plymouth Rock stock, the best New England graft; the fathers of nine tenths of us was at Bunker Hill or Valley Forge or Yorktown, but what of that, I ask you?” 

 The speaker became oratorical as his rage grew. 

 “What did Matty Van Buren say to Sidney Rigdon and Elias Higbee when they laid our cause before him at Washington after our Missouri persecutions—when the wicked hatred of them Missourians had as a besom of fire swept before it into exile the whipped and plundered Saints of Jackson County? Well, he said: ‘Gentlemen, your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you.’ That’s what a President of the United States said to descendants of Mayflower crossers who’d been foully dealt with, and been druv from their substance and their homes, their wheat burned in the stack and in the shock, and themselves butchered or put into the wilderness. And now the Lord’s word to this people is to gether out again.” 

 The younger man had listened in deep dejection. 

 “Yes, it’s to be the old story. I saw it coming. The Lord is proving us again. But surely this will be the last. He will not again put us through fire and blood.” 

 He paused, and for a moment his quick brown eyes looked far away. 

 “And yet, do you know, Bishop, I’ve thought that he might mean us to save ourselves against this Gentile persecution. Sometimes I find it hard to control myself.” 

 The Bishop grinned appreciatively. 

 “So I heer’d. The Lute of the Holy Ghost got too rambunctious back in the States on the subject of our wrongs. And so they called you back from your mission?” 

 “They said I must learn to school myself; that I might hurt the cause by my ill-tempered zeal—and yet I brought in many—” 

 “I don’t blame you. I got in trouble the first and only mission I went on, and the first time I preached, at that. When I said, ‘Joseph was ordained by Peter, James, and John,’ a drunken wag in the audience got up and called me a damned liar. I started for him. I never reached him, but I reached the end of my mission 

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