Charlotte Haven says a "long roll of manuscript" was the "writings of Abraham."

Date
Mar 5, 1843
Type
Letter
Source
Charlotte Haven
Non-LDS
Hearsay
Direct
Reprint
Reference

Charlotte Haven, Letter, March 5, 1843; rep. “A Girl’s Letters from Nauvoo,” Overland Monthly 16, no. 96 (December 1890): 623–624

Scribe/Publisher
Charlotte Haven
People
Charlotte Haven, Joseph Smith, Jr., Lucy Mack Smith
Audience
Reading Public
Transcription

From there we called on Joseph’s mother, passing the site of the Nauvoo House, a spacious hotel, the first floor only laid. It is like the Temple in being erected on the tithe system, and when finished will surpass in splendor any hotel in the State. Here Joseph and his heirs for generations are to have apartments free of expense, and they think the crowned heads of Europe will rusticate beneath its roof. Madame Smith’s residence is a log house very near her son’s. She opened the door and received us cordially. She is a motherly kind of woman of about sixty years. She receives a little pittance by exhibiting The Mummies to strangers. When we asked to see them, she lit a candle and conducted us up a short, nar,row [sic] stairway to a low, dark room under the roof. On one side were standing half a dozen mummies, to whom she introduced us, King Onitus and his royal household,—one she did not know. Then she took up what seemed to be a club wrapped in a dark cloth, and said “This is the leg of Pharaoh's daughter, the one that saved Moses.” Repressing a smile, I looked from the mummies to the old lady. but could detect nothing but earnestness and sincerity on her countenance. Then she turned to a long table, set her candle-stick down, and opened a long roll of manuscript, saying it was “the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit,” and she read several minutes from it as if it were English. It sounded very much like passages from the Old Testament—and it might have been for anything we knew—but she said she read it through the inspiration of her son Joseph, in whom she seemed to have perfect confidence. Then in the same way she interpreted to us hieroglyphics from another roll. One was Mother Eve being tempted by the serpent, who—the serpent, I mean—was standing on the tip of his tail, with which his two legs formed a tripod, and had his head in Eve's ear. I said, “But serpents don't have legs.” “They did before the fall,” she asserted with perfect confidence. The Judge slipped a coin in her hand which she received smilingly, with a pleasant, “Come again,” as we bade her goodby.

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