him, and to be exalted herself thereby in the sole way open to her, to
thrones, dominion, and power in the celestial world. There were many of
these long, profusely doored houses; but many, too, of less external
promise; of two doors or even one. Yet in a hut of one door a
well-wived Saint might be building up the Kingdom temporarily, until he
could provide a more spacious setting for the several stars in his
crown.

Then there was the capable Bishop Wright, whose long domestic barracks
were the first toward the main road beyond Bishop Coltrin's modest
two-doored hut. The Wild Ram of the Mountains, having lately been sealed
to his twelfth wife, and having no suitable apartment for her, had
ingeniously contrived a sleeping-place in a covered wagon-box at the end
of the house,--an apartment which was now being occupied, not without
some ungraceful remonstrance, by his first wife, a lady somewhat far
down in the vale of years and long past the first glamour of her
enthusiasm for the Kingdom. It had been her mischance to occupy
previously in the community-house that apartment which the good man saw
to be most suitable for his young and somewhat fastidious bride. Not
without makeshifts, indeed, many of which partook of this infelicity,
was the celestial order of marriage to be obeyed and the world brought
back to its primitive purity and innocence.

And of all persons in any degree distressed about these or other matters
of faith, Joel Rae was made the first confidant and chief comforter. In
the case just cited, for example, Bishop Wright had confessed to him
that, if anything could make him break asunder the cable of the Church
of Christ, it would be the perplexity inevitable to a maintenance of
domestic harmony under the celestial order. The first wife also
distressed this adviser with a moving tale of her expulsion from a