But it was not until the "gathering" was preached to the disciples in Great Britain, that the full significance of such a gospel was realized. True it was made as severe to the saints in America, through their persecutions; especially when at length they were driven from the borders of civilization. To the British mission, however, in the early days, we must go for striking illustrations. A "gathering dispensation" preached to Europe before the age of emigration had set in! At first it startled, aye, almost appalled the disciples in Great Britain. In those days the common people of England scarcely ever strayed ten miles from the churchyards where had slept their kindred from generation to generation. True the mechanic traveled in search of employment from one manufacturing city to another, passed along by the helping hand of trade societies; but families, as a rule, never moved. Migration was to them an incomprehensible law, to be wondered at even in the example of the birds who were forced by climate to migrate as the season changed. Migrating peoples could only be understood in the examples of the Jews or Gipseys, both of whom were looked upon as being "under the curse." "Going to London" was the crowning event of a lifetime to even the well-to-do townsman, a hundred miles distant from the metropolis; going to America was like an imagined flight to the moon. At best emigration was transportation from fatherland, and the emigration of tens of thousands of England-loving saints was a transportation to the common people without parallel for cruelty. It was long before English society forgave the American elders for preaching emigration in England. It looked upon them absolutely as the betrayers of a confiding religious people who had already been too much betrayed by an American delusion. And as observed, the doctrine of emigration from native land to America--the new world; another world in seeming--and that, too, as a necessity to salvation, or at least to the obedience of heaven's commands, appalled at first the very "elect." Nothing but the Holy Ghost could dissipate the terrors of emigration. Sister Staines shall be first chosen to personally illustrate this subject, because of the peculiarity of her experience, and for the reason that she is the wife of William C. Staines, himself an early Mormon emigrant to Nauvoo, and to-day the general emigration agent of the Church, and who, during the past fifteen years, has emigrated, under the direction of President Young, about fifty thousand souls from Europe. Others of the sisters will follow in this peculiar line of Mormon history. Priscilla Mogridge Staines was born in Widbrook, Wiltshire, England, March 11th, 1823. "My parents," she says, "were both English. My father's name was John Mogridge, and my mother's maiden name was Mary Crook.