;" and the civilization that they had left, having
covered the distance of their exile, was punishing them again for their
law-breaking fidelity to their faith. Surely they had suffered enough!
Surely it was evident that suffering only made them strong to resist!
Surely there must be somebody in power in Washington who could be
persuaded to see that, where force had always failed, there might be
some profit in employing gentleness!

This, at least, was the appeal which I had planned to make. And I had
decided to make it through Mr. Abraham S. Hewitt, then mayor of New
York City, who had been a friend of my father in Congress. He was not
in favor with the administration at Washington. He was personally
unfriendly to President Cleveland. I was a stranger to him. But I had
seen enough of him to know that he had the heart to hear a plea
on behalf of the Mormons, and the brain to help me carry that plea
diplomatically to President Cleveland.

When I arrived in New York I set about finding him without the aid of
any common friend. I did not try to reach him at his home, being aware
that he might resent an intrusion of public matters upon his private
leisure, and fearing to impair my own confidence by beginning with a
rebuff. I decided to see him in his office hours.

I cannot recall why I did not find him in the municipal buildings, but I
well remember going to and fro in the streets in search of him, feeling
at every step the huge city's absorption in its own press and hurry of
affairs, and seeing the troubles of Utah as distant as a foreign war.
It was with a very keen sense of discouragement that I took my place, at
last, in the long line of applicants waiting for a word with the man
who directed the municipal activities of this tremendous hive of eager
energy.

He was in the old Stewart building, on Broadway, near Park Place; and
he had his desk in what was, I think, a temporary office--an empty shop
used as an office--on the ground floor. There must have been fifty men
ahead of me, and they were the unemployed, as I remember it, besieging
him for work. They came to his desk, spoke, and passed with a rapidity
that was ominous. As I drew nearer, I watched him anxiously, and saw
the incessant, nervous, querulous activity of eyes, lips, hands, as
he dismissed each with a word or a scratch of the pen, and looked up
sharply at the next one.

"Well, young man," he greeted me, "what do you want?"

I replied: "I want a hal