After a night like this it was not improbable that he would fall asleep in very sound of the trumpet of truth as blown, by the grace of God, through the seership of Joseph Smith. Still he had learned much in the course of the two months. She had taught him between naps that, for fourteen hundred years, to the time of Joseph Smith, there had been a general and awful apostasy from the true faith, so that the world had been without an authorised priesthood. She had also taught him to be ill at ease away from her,—to be content when with her, whether they talked of religion or tried for the big, sulky three-pounder that had his lair at the foot of the upper Cascade. Again she had taught him that other churches had wickedly done away with immersion for the remission of sins and the laying on of hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost; also that there was a peculiar quality in the satisfaction of being near her that he had never known before,—an astonishing truth that it was fine to think about when he lay where he could look up at her pretty, serious face. He fell asleep at night usually with a mind full of confusion,—infant baptism—a slender figure in a pink dress or a blue—the Trinity—a firm little brown hand pointing the finger of admonition at him—the regeneration of man—hair, dark and lustrous, that fell often half away from what he called its “lashings”—eternal punishment—earnest eyes—the Urim and Thummim,—and a pleading, earnest voice. He knew a few things definitely: that Moroni, last of the Nephites, had hidden up unto the Lord the golden plates in the hill of Cumorah; and that the girl who taught him was in some mysterious way the embodiment of all the wonderful things he had ever thought he wanted, of all the strange beauties he had crudely pictured in lonely days along the trail. Here was something he had supposed could come true only in a different world, the kind of world there was in the first book he had ever read, where there had seemed to be no one but good fairies and children that were uncommonly deserving. Yet he had never been able to get clearly into his mind the nature and precise office of the Holy Ghost; nor had he ever become certain how he could bring this wonderful young woman in closer relationship with himself. He felt that to put out his hand toward her—except at certain great moments when he could help her over rough places and feel her golden weight upon his arm—would be to startle her, and then all at once he would awaken from a dream to find her gone. He thought he would feel very badly then, for probably he would never be able to get back into the same dream again. So he was cautious, resolving to make the thing last until it came true of itself. Once when they followed the stream down, in the late afternoon, he had mused himself so full of the wonder of her that he almost forgot his caution in an amiable impulse to let her share in his feelings.