In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart. There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism, and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson. Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her. There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity. Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her understanding, not her heart, developed. "Why believe in Moses and the prophets if not in Smith--in the miracles of yesterday if not in those of to-day?" was the question with which Halsey prefaced the sermons he began to preach. The answer that his logic deduced carried conviction to many of his hearers, but in Susannah's mind the question alone made way. _BOOK II._ CHAPTER I. In the next year, 1831, the new church was formally organised, and this was the "revelation" given for her direction by the mouth of Joseph Smith--"And now, behold, I speak unto the Church; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt love thy wife, cleaving unto her and to none else; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not speak evil of thy neighbour, nor do him any harm. Let him that goeth to the East tell them that shall be converted to flee to the West." The reports of the first missionaries, who had travelled westward, preaching both to the Indians (called by the "Saints," Lamanites) and to white men, were received in the beginning of this year, and the point designated for the first station of the Church on its way westward was a place called Kirtland, on the banks of the Chagrin River, in northern Ohio. Thither Halsey was sent, having commands to preach by the way.