Mother Smith gives an explanation of Joe's failure to secure the plates on this occasion, which he omits: "As he was taking them, the unhappy thought darted through his mind that probably there was something else in the box besides the plates, which would be of pecuniary advantage to him.... Joseph was overcome by the power of darkness, and forgot the injunction that was laid upon him." The mistakes which the Deity made in Joe's character constantly suggest to the lay reader the query why the Urim and Thummim were not turned on Joe. On September 22, 1827, when Joe visited the hill (following his own story again), the same messenger delivered to him the plates, the Urim and Thummim and the breastplate, with the warning that if he "let them go carelessly" he would be "cut off", and a charge to keep them until the messenger called for them. Mother Smith's story of the securing of the plates is to the effect that about midnight of September 21 Joseph and his wife drove away from his father's house with a horse and wagon belonging to a Mr. Knight. He returned after breakfast the next morning, bringing with him the Urim and Thummim, which he showed to her, and which she describes as "two smooth, three-cornered diamonds set in glass, and the glasses were set in silver bows that were connected with each other in much the same way as old-fashioned spectacles." She says that she also saw the breastplate through a handkerchief, and that it "was concave on one side and convex on the other, and extended from the neck downward as far as the stomach of a man of extraordinary size. It had four straps of the same material for the purpose of fastening it to the breast.... The whole plate was worth at least $500." The spectacles and breastplate seem to have been more familiar to Mother Smith than to any other of Joseph's contemporaries and witnesses. The substitution of the spectacles called Urim and Thummim for the "peek-stone" was doubtless an idea of the associate in the plot, who supplied the theological material found in the Golden Bible. Tucker considers the "spectacle pretension" an afterthought of some one when the scheme of translating the plates into a Bible was evolved, as "it was not heard of outside of the Smith family for a considerable period subsequent to the first story."* This is confirmed by the elder Smith's early account of the discovery. It would be very natural that Rigdon, with his Bible knowledge, should substitute the more respectable Urim and Thummim for the "peek-stone" of ill-repute, as the medium of translation. * "Origin, Rise, and Progress of Mormonism," p. 33.