The Great Experience

BY JULIA FARR Author of Venna Hastings
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
I. P. HENRY
THE DESERET NEWS SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH 1920
LOVINGLY DEDICATED TO MY EPHRAIM FRIENDS MRS. CATHERINE H. THOMPSON AND FAMILY
Have you been a convert to the Mormon faith? Have you left your home-land and started out for the valley in the mountains, leaving friends behind, and looking forward with an awful loneliness to the strange new land where life must begin over again with only the Lord to know and love you? And have you found, on coming to Zion, a real friend—one who opens heart and home to welcome the convert, and give that first cheering hope to the tired one, just come from the world's persecutions? If you have had that experience, readers, you can understand with what tenderness I think of Ephraim, where I experienced my first welcome, my first friends in Zion. In trying to think of a suitable setting for my heroine's home life, Ephraim came instantly to my mind, because it was here that I met the real Mormon spirit, which strengthened me to bear the disappointments of the morrow. This little city will always be to me one of the chosen spots in God's Zion. I would not have it thought that any of my characters are supposed to be those of Ephraim people. The story is one of fiction, the pioneer stories excepting. These stories are true, and belong to two prominent Utah families.
Julia Farr.
Even a child is known by his doings. —Prov. 20:11.
Dear little Ephraim with its great heart and democratic aspirations, its keen love for its own inhabitants and The stranger within the gates, its rich and poor living side by side in brotherly sympathy!
This quaint little city seems to cuddle up to the great Rocky Mountains as if for protection from the outer and larger cities of Utah, where the world has crept in and has somewhat changed the spirit of fifty years ago.
We are simple country-folks, said one of Ephraim's leading citizens, addressing a new-comer as he took her bags, but you're welcome to our home as long as you care to stay and share it with us.