But how are they going to help themselves? Raise mobs? And what can mobocrats do in the midst of Kirkpatrickites? No better than a hunter in the claws of a bear. If mobs come upon you any more here, dung your gardens with them. We don't want any excitement; but after we have done all, we will rise up, Washington-like, and break off the hellish yoke that oppresses us, and we will not be mobbed. The day before I was taken at Inlet Grove, I rode with my wife through Dixon to visit my friends, and I said to her, "Here is a good people." I felt this by the Spirit of God. The next day I was a prisoner in their midst, in the hands of Reynolds, of Missouri, and Wilson, of Carthage. As the latter drove up, he exclaimed, "Ha, ha, ha! By G--, we have got the Prophet now!" He gloried much in it, but he is now our prisoner. When they came to take me, they held two cocked pistols to my head, and saluted me with, "G-- d-- you, I'll shoot you! I'll shoot you, G-- d-- you,"--repeating these threats nearly fifty times, from first to last. I asked them what they wanted to shoot me for. They said they would do it, if I made any resistance. "Oh, very well," I replied, "I have no resistance to make." They then dragged me away, and I asked them by what authority they did these things. They said, "By a writ from the governors of Missouri and Illinois." I then told them I wanted a writ of _habeas corpus_. Their reply was, "G-- d-- you, _you shan't have it_." I told a man to go to Dixon, and get me a writ of _habeas corpus_. Wilson then repeated, "G-- d-- you, _you shan't have it:_ I'll shoot you." When we arrived at Dixon, I sent for a lawyer, who came; and Reynolds shut the door in his face, and would not let me speak to him, repeating, "G-- d-- you, I'll shoot you." I turned to him, opened my bosom, and told him to "shoot away. I have endured so much persecution and oppression that I am sick of life. Why, then, don't you shoot and have done with it, instead of talking so much about it?"