I'll never forget to my dying day just what they looked like, and the sort of writing they had.

I took them up and covered them up as the angel had said, and I carried them home and hid them, and told my folks.

That night I was an awful sick man, and the sickness was on me for some days, and when I looked again at the plates they just looked like bricks, but the angel told me that they were really the gold plates with the writing I remembered on them, but were changed lest any one should see them and die.

And I was to keep them hidden.

I know that it was true they were the plates by these two signs; firstly, whenever I hid myself and took the bricks in my hand, the words of the Book of Mormon came pouring through my mind, so I was like to cry out if I couldn't get some one to write them down; and Cowdery he did it and believed, and Martin Harris he heard me at the dictation and he believed, and likewise the Whitmers.