Fancy the fascination that there was in hearing that old lady tell, in her simple way, the story of the early Mormon settlement. For all her gentleness and the low voice in which she spoke, the tale was an epic in which she herself had figured. She was not merely the daughter of a pioneer, and the wife of one; she was a pioneer herself. She had seen it all, from the beginning. How much she had seen, how much she had endured, how much she had known of happiness and sorrow! And now, in her old age, she had a nature like a distillation made of everything there is in life, and whatever bitterness there may have been in life for her had gone, and left her altogether lovable and altogether sweet.
I did not wish to leave her house, and when I did, and when she said she hoped that I would come again, I was conscious of a lump in my throat. I do not expect you to understand it, for I do not, quite, myself. But there it was—that kind of lump which, once in a long time, will rise up in one's throat when one sees a very lovely, very happy child.
When our friend Professor Young asked us whether we had met President Joseph F. Smith, we told him of our unfortunate encounter with that gentleman, in the Lion House, a day or two before. This information led to activities on the part of the Professor, which in turn led to our being invited, on the day of our departure, to meet the President and some members of his family at the Beehive House—the official residence of the head of the church.
The Beehive House is a large old-fashioned mansion with the kind of pillared front so often seen in the architecture of the South. Its furnishings are, like the house itself, old-fashioned, homelike, and unostentatious.
I have forgotten who let us in, but I have no recollection of a maid, and I rather think the door was opened by the President himself. At all events we had no sooner entered than we met him, in the hall. His manner had changed. He was most hospitable, and walked through several rooms with us, showing us some plaster casts and paintings, the work of Mormon artists. Most
The Lion House—a large adobe building in which formerly resided the rank and file of Brigham Young's wives
of the paintings were extremely ordinary, but the work of one young sculptor was remarkable, and as the story of him is remarkable as well, I wish to mention him here.
He is a boy named Arvard Fairbanks, a grandson of Mormon pioneers, on both sides, and he is not yet twenty years of age. At twelve he started modeling animals from life. At thirteen he took a scholarship in the Art Students' League, in New York, and exhibited at the National Academy of Design. At fourteen he took another scholarship and also got an art school into trouble with the sometimes rather silly Gerry Society, for permitting a child to model from the nude. Work done by this boy at the age of fifteen is nothing short of amazing. I have never seen such finished things from the hand of a youth. His subjects—Indians, buffalo, pumas, etc.—show splendid observation and understanding, and are full of the feeling of the West. And if the West is not very proud of him some day, I shall be surprised.