the other side. The bookbinder then folded them
by hand, and severed them with an ivory paper-cutter. The result was
that the twenty-five hundred large sheets made five thousand small
sheets, with sixteen pages printed upon each side. Major Gilbert has an
unbound copy of the book, which he saved, sheet by sheet, as it came
from the press.

Martin Harris furnished the funds for printing the book by a mortgage of
three thousand dollars on his farm. He celebrated the completion of the
work by inviting all the printers to his house. Mrs. Harris (the same
who secreted the manuscript at Susquehanna) had not signed the mortgage.
Harris brought his guests within the door--as Van Camp relates it--and
introduced them to his wife, who bowed coldly and took no pains to
welcome them. At length Harris asked for the cider-pitcher, and went to
the spot indicated by his wife. Returning with it in his hand, he showed
a large hole in the bottom. "Well," said Mrs. Harris, "it has as much
bottom as your old Bible has." There was enough bottom to the Bible,
however, to give a comfortable sum of money to "Joseph Smith, Jr.,
Author and Proprietor." Orlando Sanders, son of Alonzo Sanders before
mentioned, says that the Smiths made too much money to walk any longer:
he sold them a horse, and he now has a Bible which he took in payment
for a bridle.

The most reasonable theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon connects
the work directly with Solomon Spalding, a soldier of the Revolution
from Connecticut and a graduate from Dartmouth in the class of 1785.
Failing health induced Spalding to leave the ministry and to join his
brother in a mercantile life at Cherry Valley and Richfield, New York.
In 1809 he removed thence to Conneaut, in Ashtabula county, the extreme
north-eastern corner of Ohio. Next west of Ashtabula is Lake county,
wherein is located Kirtland--a place of great historic interest to the
Mormons, as will appear before our narrative closes. While Spalding was
in Conneaut he wrote a few novels of so unmeritorious a nature that no
one would publish them. At length the opening of an Indian mound gave
him a basis of facts upon which he built a story relating to the Indian
population of America and its descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel. He
announced that the title of his novel would be _The Manuscript Found_,
and that he proposed to publish a sensational story of its discovery in
a cave in Ohio. Spalding frequently read extracts to