s bricks--they were brothers. But the book was
more interesting than the building. It is written, and all the world has
read, how to Joseph Smith an angel came down from Heaven with a pair of
celestial gig-lamps, whereby he was marvellously enabled to interpret
certain plates of gold scribbled over with dots and scratches, and
discovered by him in the ground. Which plates Joseph Smith did
translate--only he spelt the mysterious characters "caractors"--and out
of the dots and scratches produced a volume of six hundred closely
printed pages, containing the books of Nephi, first and second, Jacob,
Enos, Jarom, Omni, Mormon, Mosiah, the Record of Zeniff, the book of
Alma Helaman, the third of Nephi, the book of Ether (the whole thing is
a powerful anaesthetic, by the way), and the final book of Mononi. Three
men, of whom one I believe is now living, bear solemn witness that the
angel with the spectacles appeared unto them; eight other men swear
solemnly that they have seen the golden plates of the revelation; and
upon this testimony the book of Mormon stands. The Mormon Bible begins
at the days of Zedekiah, King of Judah, and ends in a wild and weltering
quagmire of tribal fights, bits of revelation, and wholesale cribs from
the Bible. Very sincerely did I sympathise with the inspired brothers as
I waded through their joint production. As a humble fellow-worker in the
field of fiction, I knew what it was to get good names for one's
characters. But Joseph and Hyrum were harder bestead than ever I have
been; and bolder men to boot. They created Teancum and Coriantumy,
Pakhoran, Kishkumen, and Gadianton, and other priceless names which the
memory does not hold; but of geography they wisely steered clear, and
were astutely vague as to the localities of places, because you see they
were by no means certain what lay in the next county to their own. They
marched and countermarched bloodthirsty armies across their pages; and
added new and amazing chapters to the records of the New Testament, and
reorganised the heavens and the earth as it is always lawful to do in
print. But they could not achieve style, and it was foolish of them to
let into their weird Mosaic pieces of the genuine Bible whenever the
labouring pen dropped from its toilsome parody to a sentence or two of
vile, bad English or downright "penny dreadfulism." "And Moses said unto
the people of Israel: 'Great Scott! what air you doing?'" There is no
sentence in the Book o