John Stevens' Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon WarGates, Susa Young
General
John Stevens' Courtship: A Story of the Echo Canyon War
Gates, Susa Young
Latter Day Saints -- Fiction; Utah Expedition (1857-1858) -- Fiction
"Oh, John," she sobbed, throwing her arms close about his neck, "I'm so
happy that I must cry. Don't mind, it is only that I am so grateful to
God for you and your dear love. To think, John, that I am yours, your
true wife, for time and for all eternity," and she sighed with a happy,
half-sobbing sigh, as she ceased her crying, and drew his face down to
her own that she might kiss him on the lips, she said, to begin her
married life aright, giving him always, first and last, her best loving
devotion.
Then Dian opened the lid of her little organ, and played an evening
hymn, while John watched her shining eyes and tender mouth as she
offered up for them both a hymnal of praise in their new home. After
the last note they both bowed in solemn prayer before the Throne of
Grace!
XLII.
HOME, SWEET HOME
The next morning, Diantha began at once with housewifely care to clean
and sweep her treasured dwelling. She scrubbed the kitchen floor,
already white and new; she polished the shining brass candlesticks;
she scoured the new tins, and as she worked she sang with gay abandon.
There was song in her heart, and it could not but bubble up to her lips.
These small chores were done all too soon; then she dusted and arranged
her modest belongings in the dainty "front room." After everything was
carefully "put to rights," she looked with the happy eyes of ownership
at the box, a plain, darkly-painted one, which had come clear from New
England to Nauvoo, and which held all her husband's belongings. She
would go through that, she said to herself, and see if there were any
little bits of mending to do, for of course John had no mother to take
care of his things.
She found everything folded with as exquisite neatness and care as
she herself could have given them, and in the small wooden "till" she
discovered many a little treasure. There were his small Bible and Book
of Mormon, which he always carried when out on his trips, with a small
rubber cup, also one of his traveling necessities. There was a box of
needles, pins, and cotton which Dian appropriated gleefully, whispering
to her own happy heart that her dear John should never need to put them
to use again. She carefully brushed and folded away all the modest
stores of clothing, and then she came to a small packet, on the bottom
of the trunk, and wrapped up in a paper which was marked "Private."
It never occurred to Dian, for she was not much of a novel-reader,
that there was anything mysterious in the packet; she knew her lover
husband too well. She laid that out on the stand under the window, for
she wanted John, himself, to show her all its contents, and she knew he
would.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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