And so it went on. I was met at every point by assurances as sincere as tone of voice and language could make them appear. Eventually I scrambled out of the subject as best I could, covering my retreat with the remark,-- "Well, my only justification in saying that I do not believe you, is this, that if I said I did, no one would believe me." Of this much, however, I am convinced, that whatever may have been true thirty years ago--and there has not been a single trustworthy book written about Mormonism since 1862--it is not true to-day that the Church interferes with the domestic relations of the people. When there is a divorce the Church takes care that the man does not turn his wife adrift without provision. But as far as I have been able to learn, the authorities do not meddle in any other way between man and woman, so long, of course, as neither is a scandal to the community. When a scandal arises the Church takes prompt notice of it, and the offender, if incorrigible, is next heard of as "apostatizing," or, in other words, being turned out of Mormonism as unfit to live in it. But once married into polygamy, religion is all-powerful in reconciling women to the sacrifices they have to make, precisely, I suppose, in the same way that religion reconciles the nun to the sacrifices which her Church accepts from her. Practical Plurality, then, is a very dull affair. I was disappointed in it. I had expected to see men with long whips, sitting on fences, swearing at their gangs of wives at work in the fields. I expected every now and then to hear of drunken saints beating seven or eight wives all at once, and perhaps even to have seen the unusual spectacle of a house full of women and children rushing screaming into the street with one intoxicated husband and father in pursuit. Everywhere else in the world wife-beating is a pastime more or less indulged in coram publico. In London, at any rate, men so arrange their chastisements that you can hear the screams from the street and see the wife run out of the front door on to the pavement. In Salt Lake City therefore, it seemed only reasonable to suppose that the amount of the screaming would be in proportion to the number of the wives, and that eventually ill-used families would be seen pouring simultaneously out of several doors, and scattering over the premises with hideous ululation. Where are the aged apostles who have so often been described as going about in their swallow-tail coats courting each other's daughters? Where are the "girl-hunting elders" and "ogling bishops"? Where are the families of one man and ten wives to be found taking the air together that pictures have so often shown us? Of course there are anomalies, and very objectionable they are. Thus one young man has married his half-aunt, another his half-sister, and three sisters have wedded the same man; but these instances are all "historical," so to speak, and have been so often trotted out by anti-Mormon book-makers, that they